I feel that deep and terrible binding for what it is, I know its face and its name, and it’s not a binding at all, but love, and maybe that’s the same king of thing after all.

I never worked out how to be relied upon and also free.

It isn’t fair to be the kind of creature who is able to love but unable to stay.

All these humans have left no space for anything else.

It’s impossible to control someone else’s capacity for forgiveness.

The only true threat to birds that has ever existed is us.

Sitting here now, in the uppermost part of this boat, I would give anything, any part of me – my flesh or my blood or my very heart itself – to be back inside one of those nights, standing beside her in the dark, she who infuriated and confused me, she who was unknowable and unreachable, she who loved me when no one else did, only I was too intent on loneliness to see it.

I smile. “There are languages without words, without voices. I’ll teach them to you.

My life has been a migration without a destination, and that in itself is senseless. I leave for no reason, just to be moving, and it breaks my heart a thousand times, a million.

I can’t move to pull on my clothes except that somehow I do, and I can’t stand on two feet except that somehow I do, and I can’t walk, there’s no way I can walk, except I do. I take step after step after step after step.