I felt that our survival was owed to our slightness, that we danced through ruinous currents as dry leaves do, and were not capsized because the ruin we rode upon was meant for greater things.

And here we find our great affinity with water, for like reflections in water our thoughts will suffer no changing shock, no permanent displacement. They mock us with their seeming slightness. If they were more substantial — if they had weight and took up space — they would dink or be carried away in the general flux. But they persist, outside the brisk and ruinous energies of the world.

If I had one particular complaint, it was that my life seemed composed entirely of expectations. I expected — and arrival, an explanation, an apology. There had never been one, a fact I could have accepted, were it not true that, just when I had got used to the limits and dimensions of one moment, I was expelled into the next and made to wonder again if any shapes hid in its shadows. That most moments were substantially the same did not detract at all from the possibility that the next moment might be utterly different. And so the ordinary demanded unblinking attention. Any tedious hour might be the last of its kind.

It was the kind if loneliness that makes clocks seem slow and loud and made voices sound like voices across water.

They seldom spoke in our hearing or looked at us directly, but we stole glimpses of their faces. They were like the people in old photographs — we did not see them through a veil of knowledge and habit, but simply and plainly, as they were lined or scarred, as they were startled or blank.