A piercing bird call shot in through the open window, a call I’d never heard before. A new season’s new bird. A beam of afternoon sun landed on her cheek. I lazily watched a white cloud move from one edge of the window to the other. We stayed like that for the longest time. “Is anything wrong?” she asked. “I don’t know how to put it, but I just can’t get it through my head that here and now is really here and now. Or that I am really me. It doesn’t quite hit home. It’s always this way. Only much later on does it ever come together. For the last ten years, it’s been like this.” “Ten years?”
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