The Glass Hotel

I’m on the beach, not far from the pier where the mail boat comes in, and my mother is here. She’s sitting some distance away, on a driftwood log, hands folded on her lap, with an air of waiting calmly for an appointment. Her hair is still braided, she’s still thirty-six years old, still in the red cardigan she was wearing the day she disappeared. It was an accident, of course it was, she would never have left me on purpose. She has waited so long for me. She was always here. This was always home. She’s gazing at the ocean, at the waves on the shore, and she looks up in amazement when I say her name.

I am holding hands with my mother. I am very small. We are in Caiette, picking mushrooms in the woods. A memory, but it’s a memory so vivid that there’s a feeling of time travel, of visiting the actual moment. What a pleasure to be here again! “Oh look, my lamb,” she says, stooping to pluck a fluted little orange shape from the dark earth, “this one is a chanterelle.”

“I’m no expert, but I remember reading somewhere, every time you retrieve a memory, that act of retrieval, it corrupts the memory a little bit. Maybe changes it a little.”

It is possible to disappear in the space between countries.

he was dressed in one of those outfits that look casual at first glance but are in fact comprised entirely of coded signals

Later, considering the memory from afar, from FCI Florence Medium 1, Alkaitis doesn’t remember much about the picnic. What he remembers is afterward: a sense of calm at the end of the long strange day, a temporary peace, sitting there in the shade with his whole family together, and then an hour or so when the sun is setting and their parents are starting to talk about driving Lucas back to the train station (“unless you’d like to stay here tonight, honey, you know there’s always room…”), one last beautiful hour of throwing a Frisbee with his brother in the deepening twilight, running and diving over grass, the pale disk spinning through the dark.

One of our signature flaws as a species: we will risk almost anything to avoid looking stupid.

She made her way uptown through the furnace of the subway system and observed the way the life of the city continued around her, indifferent and uninterrupted.

There is exquisite lightness in waking each morning with the knowledge that the worst has already happened.

Do you have to actually be in love for a relationship to be real, whatever real means, so long as there’s respect and something like friendship?