“I heard silence, silence infinite as the bottom of the ocean, a silence that sealed.”

“I believed I could identify the scent of the sky as I stood there, a blue menthol fragrance similar to the scent of seawater that sprayed into my face when I first dove into the ocean. That initial scent was much more subtle than the ocean's heavy, fishy aroma; it was a whiff of salt and mint, just as I approached the water on a dive, that warned me that a more powerful scent would soon enter my nose. It was the scent I dreamed in. And it was the scent of that spring sky as I stood in my yard.”

“I heard silence, silence infinite as the bottom of the ocean, a silence that sealed.”

“When you sit in silence long enough, you learn that silence has a motion. It glides over you without shape or form, exactly like water. Its color is silver. And silence has a sound you hear only after hours of wading inside it. The sound is soft, like flute notes rising up, like the words of glass speaking. Then there comes a point when you must shatter the blindness of its words, the blindness of its light.”

“I looked around at the rooms that I did not see as rooms but more as a landscape for my emotions, a biography of memory.”

“I stood there feeling the lightness of my bones, knowing now this was not only lack of sleep that had transformed my bones into feathers, but my body's recognition that soon I would be leaving this place I had inhabited for one year, this place made entirely of grief.”