“The pleasure almost split me like a baking stuffed tomato. Like my heart swelled and my skin got thinner and thinner in the heat of it. Of company.”

“I woke sometime in the middle of the night and lay in the hammock, wriggled my foot out of the sleeping bag into the chill and found the rough ground with my bare foot and rocked myself back and forth. And watched the stars swim against the mesh of leaves. Like a fish nosing a net.This is what we are, what we do: nose a net, push push, a net that never exists. The knots in the mesh as strong as our own believing. Our own fears.”

“Jasper's weight on my leg an aching absence.”

“How you refill. Lying there. Something like happiness, just like water, pure and clear pouring in. So good you don’t even welcome it, it runs through you in a bright stream, as if it has been there all along.”

“Grief is an element. It has its own cycle like the carbon cycle, the nitrogen. It never diminishes not ever. It passes in and out of everything.”

“There is no one to tell this to and yet it seems very important to get this right. The reality and what it is like to escape it. That even now it is sometimes too beautiful to bear.”

“I open it so he has no choice. At the crack of the top and the sound of the fizz he winces like one more Coke down, one less in the world.”