Riding the Bullet

“Love you, too. Alan . . . sorry for all the times I swatted you. That was no way to be.”
But it had been; it had been her way to be. I didn’t know how to tell her I knew that, accepted it. It was part of our family secret, something whispered along the nerve endings.

I loved her when she hit me as much as when she kissed me. Do you understand that? Me either. And that’s all right. I don’t think you can sum up lives or explain families, and we were a family, she and I, the smallest family there is, a tight little family of two, a shared secret.

I didn’t want to let him know I knew he was dead. He didn’t want to let me know that he knew I knew he was dead. And so I couldn’t let him know that I knew that he knew that . . .

She was full of stuff like that, little Zen aphorisms that almost made sense