“I feel myself shutting down, closing off, like I should tell people, ‘No, we don’t use this heart anymore. It’s too fragile.’”

“It puzzles me how people can be happy in these months. October comes, then November, and they carry on their lives as if nothing is different. But the sky is greyer. The air is sharp with ice. Quite literally, the light is gone. How can they not feel that to their cores, like I do?”

““You’re not a monster,” I said. But I lied. What I really wanted to say was that a monster is not such a terrible thing to be. From the Latin root monstrum, a divine messenger of catastrophe, then adapted by the Old French to mean an animal of myriad origins: centaur, griffin, satyr. To be a monster is to be a hybrid signal, a lighthouse: both shelter and warning at once.”

“I feel I’m getting elusive again. I feel the floating, the absence of an anchor, the absence of solidity, integration. I feel diffuse. Lost.”