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Her sharp features give her a perpetually pensive expression, but the dark embers of her eyes are filled with empathy and something close to wistfulness. It was this intensity of feeling that brought them together, Meadow thinks, years and years ago. A desire or predilection to grasp at the spongy substance of living, to squeeze the essence out and make some sense of it.

Time flows differently late at night. The silvery current that whisks life forward during daylight hours starts to grow murky and dark, the waters slowly to a confused churn. This darkening also reveals other aspects of reality that are not so apparent in the glaring white noise of the everyday: subtle textures and gradations, a porous quality to things that are supposedly solid.

We live in a forest of symbols, in the modern world. Indeed, one can choose to interpret them in any number of ways. It is all too easy to forget the procession of the symbol, to flatten the signifiers with the signified. A name, a number, a note of music, they all have their own solitary power detached from the things they represent. They exist as shapes and sounds in primal, elemental form. This essential form is their meaning, to put it simply.

He yearned to give shape to his existential desires, explain in words what the pulsing, vital mass within him was driving at.

All homes are manifestations of the psyche; home is the material expression of one’s state of being, the interior made exterior.

"As the pilot comes on the intercom in a jaunty Australian accent and tells the flight attendants to please be seated for takeoff, Meadow clutches his belly and closes his eyes. The heat of the cabin is oppressive, familiar. He considers how banal an experience this has become: New York to Shanghai, an arc between his present and past. How many hundreds, no, thousands of hours has he lost to unseen trade winds, glazed eyes glued to deep-sea trenches marked on a digital map? It's as if crossing these meridians once or twice a year, rather than the act of living, has caused him to age. This nowhere-space is his home, excruciating and perfect for someone like him, a grown-ass man still clueless about who he is or what he's doing. By the end of summer, he'll have lived in New York for ten long years, conferring a supposed legitimacy on his claim to the city. Yet he feels more detached than ever, unable to sink roots no matter how hard he tries. And this fate seems perfectly encapsulated by his current age of thirty-one: a prime number, indivisible and impenetrable. No spring chicken, but far from middle age."

It is so short and jumbled and jangled because there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre. Everybody is supposed to be dead, to never say anything or want anything ever again. Everything is supposed to be very quiet after a massacre, and it always is, except for the birds.

bodied ligature