A Little Life

by Hanya Yanagihara

He’d watch that kind light suffuse the car like syrup, watch it smudge furrows from foreheads, slick gray hairs into gold, gentle the aggressive shine from cheap fabrics into something lustrous and fine.

It was impossible to explain to the healthy the logic of the sick, and he didn’t have the energy to try.

and his constant nervousness, which at times seemed almost physical, an appendage like a tail, fell away.

He woke missing Willem so profoundly that he felt he was going blind.

I wish I believed in some sort of life after life, that in another universe, maybe on a small red planet where we have not legs but tails, where we paddle through the atmosphere like seals, where the air itself is sustenance, composed of trillions of molecules of protein and sugar and all one has to do is open one’s mouth and inhale in order to remain alive and healthy,