1. Sometimes music is needed. 2. Sometimes silence. 3. A novel, like all written things, is a piece of music, the language demanding you make a sound… - Alexander Chee

If anything, I was proud of it. I had endured I told myself. I was so strong. But this is not strength. It is only endurance. A kind of emotional or therapeutic anorexia. I was not strong. Or if I was, it was the adrenaline of the wounded. I was really only broken, moving through the landscape as if I were not, and taking all my pride in believing I was passing as whole.

"What would you read to someone who was dying?" Annie Dillard had asked our class. She wanted this to be the standard for our work. There, at the memorial service for my friend, I thought of another: Dying, what stories would you tell?

I became something they couldn’t imagine, something they would have kept me from becoming, and that, it seems to me, was always in my nature to become.