And so, at school, I became the girl by the door: Odile who stands by herself. Never spoken to and seldom spoken of. Staring at nothing with eyes like carved wood, as motionless as an effigy. - P3
If I were to go west, I could find him, and watch him for a bit. He’d be in his early twenties on the other side of the mountains, and would have met my mother only recently, hanging out by the fountain in the Place du Bâtisseur. - P8
The truth was that he was not so much a vivid loss in my life as an abstract deficit, - P8
What I felt was a kind of thrilling sadness, something I have since experienced when looking out over other open spaces and lonely boundaries: an emotion that lives on the desolate edge of the known. - P9
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