It was the kind of building that remembered things, deep-down things, things that rode tears into the world, telling them back to anyone old enough or wise enough to know how to listen with their eyes.
I better understood the little lies that liquor told, lifting spirits and drowning sorrows while withholding the whole truth--that, in the end, it is the spirit in peril of drowning. Sorrows have gills.
Children see God every day; they just don't call it that. It's the summer sky painted with cumulus clouds by day and sequined with a million stars by night. It's the sweet whispers of sweet gum trees and the sounds riding the tops of honeysuckle-scen...
I don't know how to describe the sound of a world crashing. Maybe there is no sound, just a great emptiness, an enveloping sorrow, a creeping nothingness that coils itself around you like a stiff wire.
It was words and reading that had made me quiet, and being quiet had made me a mark.
I had been fortified by trauma, the way a bone, once broken, grows back stronger than it had been.
