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Some scientists believe if you place a virus into a petri dish of water then remove it, the water retains memory of the virus. This would mean that molecules can communicate with each other without being in physical contact. Other scientists contest this, consider the water memory scientists to be naive dreamers. Last night, I sat under the stars holding your ratty sweater against my cheek.

Her skin and hair are grayed by the salt air’s assault, as if she is becoming one of the canal boulders restraining the land so the ferries and ships can sing by.

I rescue a dragonfly from a spider’s web using my car key. It is out of the fire, as it were, but the web has shrink-wrapped its left wing. It bats itself against the concrete, spiraling pointlessly. I bear witness. Is life very fragile or very resilient? This dragonfly’s struggle scores one for both.

I wish we were already there. Let’s never die. Let’s never not have fun again.

Someone says, let’s have a beach day. Let’s bring blankets and cold salads and swim. Let’s comment on how the boats look in the distance and ask one another for advice. I’ll bring what I’m good at, you bring what you’re good at. Get that girl who’s good at everything to come. Will you come? You don’t see why not. I’ll drive unless you want to.

I dreamed myself into emotional survival but I wasn’t afforded an opportunity to live in my waking hours.

I was more of my father’s son than my mother’s.

I don’t enjoy being heartbroken but I’m saying I enjoy the point of heartbreak where we convince ourselves that literally everything is on the table, and run into whatever will dull the sharp echoing for a night, or a week, until the week becomes a year. It’s the madness that both seduces and offers your own window out once it’s done with you.

At what volume, tone, and tener do you allow black people to enter your life for praise or for scolding.
The link between black music and black survival shows up most urgently when the stakes are at their highest. When I say that music is how black people have gotten free, I mean Harriet Tubman echoed songs along the Underground Railroad as a language.

We were wishes that never came true.

Life, if anything, is too long. We accumulate too much along the way. Too many heartbreaks, too many funerals, too many physical setbacks. It’s a miracle any of us survive at all.

It is a luxury to romanticize blood. It is a luxury to be able to fetishize violence.

Home is where the heart begins but not where it stays.

And then, across the village, there came the high, metallic notes of the church bells pealing, as if the sound, as if time itself, were being pulled upwards, brightly, into the sky.

..he had gone on without me into a life freer than my own.

‘It’s okay. I know.’ I didn’t ask him what he knew, because I was terrified of having the words spoken aloud. He knew that I loved him, and all he could give me was his permission to go on loving him, unreturned. My heart felt so tight in my chest that it was painful, and I couldn’t take the look in his eyes, so deep and sympathetic and kind.

I was half pain, half ecstasy. I built the scene in his mind, feeding off his desire for her, and at first I felt uneasy, as though I was manipulating him, but he didn’t seem to find it strange, or else the strangeness excited him, because I noticed a new urgency in the way he focused on Mia’s imagined body, and after a moment he gave a long exhale, almost a sigh, and then there was the sound of his sleeping

As we walked, I could see the colours of our clothes reflected in the canal, and the image of the two of us there was like a picture, something I watched more than I watched the real thing, as though it was the image in the canal that made us real.

was a sort of mirror of me – his escape was the inverse of mine, his history the history I was trying to run from, the one he was trying to run back towards. I didn’t see how the two could ever run together, pulled as they were to opposite poles, tides governed by moons that rose and fell at different times in the same sky.

There was something in the words – the same ones he had used, I know, as if to say we knew each other then, or had done for a long while now, though neither of us had really said it before. I knew him because he

There were days when I worried that my desire for more love, more touch, was ruining the life in front of me. I could not sit in a place of wanting and still exist. Life was slipping by like water, flowing around me.

I had never seen his chest, never seen his bare shoulders. These things were left to fantasy. They were also a reminder of separation: I had to imagine them, and in imagining them I was reminded of their hiddenness, the way they were kept from me.

Perhaps I wanted to possess him by giving to him, by giving everything I could – if only to be the bringer of joy and pleasure to his door, so that, if he would not have me, at least he might not dispense with me.

Beneath Luke’s pale skin, which almost seemed to glow, and beneath the blush of his cheeks, I imagined an ocean of thought, a hidden spring of love, and I thought, if only he was brave enough, if only I could make it safe enough, he would let me in.

All I wanted was to see him go there, to see him sink into fantasy and be lost in it. There was nothing more entrancing to me than seeing that reverie.

..he was living inside them now, his mind wandering through the pages, undressing one woman, kissing another, dreaming of them so utterly that he had, for a minute at least, drifted out of the world. It might seem strange that I didn’t mind this. I didn’t mind that he was thinking of other people, that he might be imagining anyone but me.

..his breath was in my breath, so I could smell the heat off him, could almost taste him in my mouth. I was trapped there, part resentment, part pure pleasure, so close to him, so close to his power, that for a split second I thought perhaps he wanted me to kiss him.

.. but then, without a word, Eddie dropped off the chair, hitting his head against the back of it, and there was the thud of his body against the floor, but no scream, no gasp, no human sound at all.

No matter which it was, the dream would always arrive at this point, and I would wait and wait, staring up at the small black square of his window, my breath catching in my throat, willing him to turn on the light, so that I could see that thrill on his face, that look of eager love, as though he was about to be made whole, and he could feel it.

Just looking at the images, I felt somehow more like a man, but I also wished that I was a girl, so that men would look at me like this, would feel like this about