I know something about dread myself, and appreciate the elaborate systems with which some people fill the void, appreciate all the opiates of the peo… - Joan Didion

unaccustomed to the ambushes of family life, and perhaps it is just as well that I can offer her little of that life. I would like to give her more. I would like to promise her that she will grow up with a sense of her cousins and of rivers and of her great-grandmother’s teacups, would like to pledge her a picnic on a river with fried chicken and her hair uncombed, would like to give her home for her birthday, but we live differently now and I can promise her nothing like that. I give her a xylophone and a sundress from Madeira, and promise to tell her a funny story.

I closed the box and put it in a closet.
There is no real way to deal with everything we lose.

I have already lost touch with a couple of people I used to be...