Sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof that you’ve been ruined.

I know. It’s not fair that the word laughter is trapped inside slaughter.

Is that what art is? To be touched thinking what we feel is ours when, in the end, it was someone else, in longing, who finds us?

But without a name, things get lost. The image, however, is clear.

On page 187, the line “Too much joy, I swear, is lost in our desperation to keep it” is influenced by Zen Buddhist theory on joy and impermanence, as echoed by Max Ritvo in his 2016 interview with Divedapper.com.” [acknowledgements]