Nothing was irrevocable; everything was within reach... I could make promises to myself and to other people and there would be all the time in the wo… - Joan Didion

He would say something and she would say something and before either of them knew it they would be playing out a dialogue so familiar that it drained the imagination, blocked the will, allowed them to drop words and whole sentences and still arrive at the cold conclusion.

Leis go brown, tectonic plates shift, deep currents move, islands vanish, rooms get forgotten.

perhaps something else besides, for Sacramento is California, and California is a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things had better work here, because here, beneath that immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.