Florida

It is terribly true, even if the truth does not comfort, that if you look at the moon for long enough night after night, as I have, you will see that the old cartoons are correct, that the moon is, in fact, laughing. But it is not laughing at us, we lonely humans, who are far too small and our lives far too fleeting for it to give us any notice at all.

eard that they have started building a nest again, though how they can bear it after all they’ve lost I do not know.

these gorgeous changes that insist that not everything is decaying faster than we can love it.
I walk on, and as the boy’s trottin

conversation not meant for me, a snip of flesh that was not his, and without letting him know I was in the house, I about-faced and went out again and walked until it was too cold to walk, until just before dawn, when the dew

as if reading could somehow sate this hunger for grief, instead of what it does, which is fuel it.

the messes they sustain, the delicious whiffs of cooking that c

of the little girls came close to her and put a hand on the sole of her foot. When she was little, she’d had the same hunger for touch.

how they all used to complain that they were too poor for lattes.

She could feel the ocean pulling at her back but didn’t turn to say goodbye. It had failed to do what she had longed for it to do; it had been indifferent, after all.

How light she thought she had been before. How truly light she was now.