"Lovers who kill each other now will blame it on the wind."

Her beauty was like the edge of a very sharp knife.

"Always learn poems by heart," she said. "They have to become the marrow in your bones. Like fluoride in the water, they'll make your soul impervious to the world's soft decay."

Beauty was my mother's law, her religion. You could do anything you wanted, as long as you were beautiful, as long as you did things beautifully. If you weren't, you just didn't exist.

Only peons made excuses for themselves, she taught me. Never apologize, never explain.

I hungered for Barry, I thought he might be the one, someone who could feed us and hold us and make us real.

...went downstairs and swam in the pool warm as tears.

I wanted to freeze this moment forever... I wished I could shut it in a locket to wear around my neck.

She was breaking her rules. They weren't stone after all, only small and fragile as paper cranes.

She wrote tiny haiku that she slipped into his pockets.

Passion. I never imagined it was something that could happen to her. These were days she couldn't recognize herself in a mirror, her eyes black with it, her hair forever tangled...

My mother couldn't sleep, she jumped whenever the phone rang. I hated to see the look on her face when it wasn't Barry. A tone I'd never heard crept into her voice, serrated, like the edge of a saw.

It was the final impossibility.

Now I wished she'd never broken any of her rules. I understood why she held to them so hard. Once you broke the first one, they all broke, one by one, like firecrackers exploding in your face...

Her eyes were strange, circled dark like bruises, and her hair was greasy and lank. She lay on her bed, or stared at herself in the mirror. "How can I shed tears for a man I should never have allowed to touch me in any way?"

"Honey, this is what happens when you fall in love. You're looking at a natural disaster."

"A jewel is forming inside my body. No, it's not my heart. This is harder, cold and clean."

She no longer spoke the language I did.

"Taste his fear. It tastes just like champagne. Cold and crisp and absolutely without sweetness."

How it was that the earth could open up under you and swallow you whole, close above you as if you never were.

I slept until sleep seemed like waking and waking like sleep.

The nearest I'd come to feeling anything like God was the plain blue cloudless sky and a certian silence, but how do you pray to that?

It felt good to be held. I breathed in his smell, cigarettes and stale body and beer and fresh-cut wood, something green.

My mother was a woman people stopped in the marker to wonder at... just at the sheer beauty. They seemed startled she had to shop and eat like anyone else.

...but her blue eyes were as clear as a high note on a violin.

If evil means to be self-motivated, to be the center of one's own universe, to live on one's own terms, then every artist, every thinker, every original mind, is evil. Because we dare to look through our own eyes rather than mouth cliches lent us from the so-called Fathers.

If you were really strong, you could have tolerated the humiliation.