It seems we need someone to know us as we are–with all we have done–and forgive us. We need to tell. We need to be whole in someone’s sight: Know this about me, and yet...

But even then I knew how it was going to be, I could feel the coming silence in the long, poisonous pauses that expanded as the night progressed.

For it wasn’t the secret–the secret that wasn’t a secret anyway–that led to austerity in our lives. It was the austerity that led to the secret. And what I had been marked by, probably most...

The abundance of ordinary things, their convenient arrangement here, seemed for the moment a personal gift to me. As did my ability to notice this, to be grateful for it.

A secret weighs on us, a terrible secret weighs with a terrible weight.

…the words make our silences easier–they’re the current that runs under them.