Adam named the living animals, MaddAddam names the dead ones. - Margaret Atwood

Giving up was the new normal, and I have to say it was catching.

Modesty is invisibility...Never forget it. To be seen — to be seen — is to be...penetrated. What you must be girls, is impenetrable.

I try to congure, to raise my own spirits, from wherever they are. I need to remember what they look like. I try to hold them still behind my eyes, their faces, like pictures in an album. But they won't stay still for me, they move, there's a smile and it's gone, their features curl and bend as if the paper's burning, blackness eats them. A glimpse, a pale shimmer on the air; a glow, aurora, dance of electrons, then a face again, faces. But they fade, though I stretch out my arms towards them, they slip away from me, ghosts at daybreak. Back to wherever they are. Stay with me, I want to say. But they won't.

It's my fault. I am forgetting too much.