Though the contradictions of war seem sudden and simultaneous, history stalks before it strikes. Something tolerated soon becomes something good.

History and memory share events; that is, they share time and space. Every moment is two moments.

Even as a child, even as my blood-past was drained from me, I understood that if I were strong enough to accept it, I was being offered a second history.

The shadow-past is shaped by everything that never happened. Invisible, it melts the present like rain through karst. A biography of longing. It steers us like magnetism, a spirit torque. This is how one becomes...

Then, one paints it again.”‘- Anne Michaels, The Winter Vault

The mainland can stretch until it breaks at the weakest points, and those weaknesses are called faults. Each island represented a victory and a defeat: it had either pulled itself free or pulled too hard...

…when we say we’re looking for a spiritual adviser, we’re really looking for someone to tell us what to do with our bodies. Decisions of the flesh. We forget to learn from pleasure as well...

And she knew for the first time that someone can wire your skin in a single evening, and that love arrives not by accumulating to a moment, like a drop of water focused on the...

Ah. It was you.

Any given moment—no matter how casual, how ordinary—is poised, full of gaping life.

When my parents were liberated, four years before I was born, they found that the ordinary world outside the camp had been eradicated. There was no more simple meal, no thing was less than extraordinary:...

If love wants you; if you’ve been melted down to stars, you will love with lungs and gills; with feathers and scales; with warm blood and cold.

True hope is severed from expectation.

Perhaps we painted on our own skin, with ochre and charcoal, long before we painted on stone.