“She spent all her free time either drawing the strange things she saw in her dreams, or with her nose inside historical novels. The world held inthe pages of history felt like the real world, and the present day an illusion she had to suffer through until she could escape back into the pages of abook.”

“She had made her choice, and this was it, where she felt safe, in a world she could, for the most part, control. Page 328”

“But of course, it had all been her – by her and about her, and now she was back in the world, not one she could make, but the one that had made her, and she felt herself shrinking under the early evening sky”

“She loved books. She loved them with her senses and her intellect. They way they looked and smelled; the way they felt in her hands; the way the pages seemed to murmur as she turned them. Everything there is in the world, she thought, is in books.”

“She told her journal about me passing by her in the parking lot, about how on that night I had touched her-literally, she felt it, reached out. What I had looked like then. How she dreamed about me. How she had fashioned the idea that a spirit could be a sort of second skin for someone, a protective layer somehow. How maybe if she was assiduous she could free us both. I would read over her shoulder as she wrote down her thoughts and wonder if anyone might believe her one day. When she was imagining me, she felt better, less alone, more connected to something out there. To someone out there. She saw the corn field in her dreams, and a new world opening, a world where maybe she could find a foothold too. “You’re a really good poet Ruth,” she imagined me saying, and her journal would release her into a daydream of being such a good poet that her words had the power to resurrect me.”

“living eulogy.she danced.she sang. she took.she gave.she loved.she created.she dissented. she enlivened.she saw. she grew. she sweated.she changed.she learned. she laughed.she shed her skin.she bled on the pages of her days,she walked through walls,she lived with intention.”