It was wonderful to sit with her head on my shoulder for hours and feel as I always have, even now, closer to her than to any other human being. And I wouldn’t mind a bit if in a few years you and I could snuggle up together under a stone in some old graveyard here. That is really a happy thought and not melancholy at all.

I got tired, I told him. Not worn out, but worn through. Like one of those wives who wakes up one morning and says I can’t bake any more bread. You never bake bread, he wrote, and we were still joking. Then it’s like I woke up and baked bread, I said, and we were joking even then. I wondered will there come a time when we won’t be joking? And what would it look like? And how would that feel? When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much. A calender that showed the wrong month. I could have cried over it. I did. Where the smoke from the chimney ended. How an overturned bottle rested at the edge of a table. I spent my life learning to feel less. Every day I felt less. Is that growing old? Or is it something worse? You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.

On some days, my head is filled with such wild and original thoughts that I can barely utter a word. On other days, the liquor store is closed.