I'm fine, said Pilar, for the moment. And the moment is the only time we can be fine in.

It's evening, one of those gray water-color washes, like liquid dust.

The bell that measures time is ringing.

For years I wanted to be older, and now I am.

If there were no emptiness, there would be no life.

And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time. There is a good deal of comfort, now, in remembering this.

Condoms seemed to her inherently wicked. But they were also inherently funny. They were like rubber gloves with only one finger, and every time she saw one she had to be severe with herself or she'd get the giggles, a terrifying thought because the man might think you were laughing at him, at his dick, at its size, and that would be fatal.

Life Stories: Why hunger for these? One, it fits a hunger. Maybe it is more like bossiness. Maybe we just want to be in charge of the life, no matter who lived it...

Time: old cold time, old sorrow, settling down in layers like silt in a pond.

History (that list of ballooning wishes, flukes, bent times, plunges and mistakes clutched like parachutes) is rolling itself up in your head at one end unrolling at the other.

So much for endings. Beginnings are always more fun. True connoisseurs, however, are known to favor the stretch in between, since it's the hardest to do anything with.

It is not only the body that travels, Adam One used to say, it is also the Soul. And the end of one journey is the beginning of another.