As I Recall, You Promised To Call

That Was The Worst Part About Having Cancer, Sometimes: The Physical Evidence Of Disease Separates You From Other People.

I Felt Tired For The First Time, And I Thought Of Us Lying Down On Some Grassy Patch Of Seaworld Together, Me On My Back And She On Her Side With Her Arm Draped Against Me, Her Head On My Shoulder, Facing Me. Not Doing Anything--just Lying There Together Beneath The Sky, The Night Here So Well Lit That It Drowns Out The Stars. And Maybe I Could Feel Her Breathe Against My Neck, And Maybe We Could Just Stay There Until Morning And Then The People Would Walk Past Us As They Came Into The Park, And They Would See Us And Think That We Were Tourists, Too, And We Could Just Disappear Into Them.

The Five Of Us Walking Confidently In A Row, I'd Never Felt Cooler. The Great Perhaps Was Upon Us, And We Were Invincible. The Plan May Have Had Faults, But We Did Not.

To Find Margo Roth Spiegelman, You Must Become Margo Roth Spiegelman. And I Had Done Many Of The Things She Might Have Done: I Had Engineered A Most Unlikely Prom Coupling. I Had Quieted The Hounds Of Caste Warfare. I Had Come To Feel Comfortable Inside The Rat-infested Haunted House Where She Did Her Best Thinking. I Had Seen. I Had Listened. But I Could Not Yet Become The Wounded Person.

It's Hard As Hell To Hold On To Your Dignity When The Risen Sun Is Too Bright In Your Losing Eyes, And That's What I Was Thinking About As We Hunted For Bad Guys Through The Ruins Of A City That Didn't Exist.