Girl With Curious Hair

wonder why it is so powerful, why she needs to do it, why it bothers my father so much. I can still wonder if it might be a kind of bridge between what is and what could have been, what is and what isn’t anymore, what is and what never was, and that wouldn’t make the crying any less awful but it would make a kind of sense.

But being around Dov made her feel impatient with her twenty-year-old brain and the quality of its ideas.

Why is this person always the same, and always in the way—a mumbling roadblock, a pointy Lego brick underfoot, a smelly heap of laundry blocking the bathroom door—and also, somehow, the only path back to sanity?

She just stares at me blankly like she didn’t hear a word, then checks her lips in a compact and stares at me some more, asks me what a wok is, what the word “invisible” means.