The galaxy belonged to them, and as terror was communicated to our children, I saw mastery communicated to theirs.

And I have no God to hold me up. And I believe that when they shatter the body they shatter everything, and I knew that all of us—Christians, Muslims, atheists—lived in this fear of this truth.

I wanted you to claim the whole world, as it is. I wanted “Tolstoy is the Tolstoy of the Zulus” to immediately be obvious to you.

On her thirtieth birthday she took a trip to Paris. I am not sure you remember. You were only six. We spent that

They look out past their tormentors, past us, and focus on something way beyond anything known to me. I think they are fastened to their god, a god whom I cannot know and in whom I do not believe. But, god or not, the armor is all over them, and it is real. Or perhaps it is not armor at all. Perhaps it is life extension, a kind of loan allowing you

When the assembled mourners bowed their heads in prayer, I was divided from them because I believed that the void would not answer back.

regularly.

body because neither security nor sanctity existed in the first place.

Everything that was the past seemed to be another life. There was before you, and then there was after, and in this after, you were the God I’d never had. I submitted before your needs, and I knew then that I must survive for something more than survival’s sake. I must survive for you.