“Bring to me, it said, continual proof / you’ve been alive.”

“ConnubialBecause with alarming accuracy she’d been identifying patterns I was unaware of—this tic, that tendency, like the way I’ve mastered the language of intimacy in order to conceal how I felt— I knew I was in danger of being terribly understood.”

“I’ve triedto become someone else for a while,only to discover that he, too, was me.”