The strain I heard in Manu's tone when he talked on the phone was also this: the effort to make it seem that he was still part of their old schoolboy mythology.
Everyone, it seemed to me, had something truly weird about them, something unique and bizarre.
And we had a name for the two of us: the Ts, short for a word we'd invented more than a decade ago, which signified two people who were in love, who were a litle sad, a little misfortunate, who had always been somewhat clumsy and lonely.
Rather, I mistrusted the woman's process of abstraction, simply because I'd grown so weary of life in the abstract.
Then look at me when I'm speaking to you.
The poems cleared out spaces in us and filled us with their shapes.
It was as if, I said, Lena could spot insincerity before anyone else and could not pretend afterward that she hadn't seen it.
Some people, my grandmother said mysteriously, are born holding a mirror to the world.
Their own home resembled the lobby of a three-star hotel.
The true baskers don't do anything at all.
You two must talk, she told us, before stepping away. It wasn't entirely clear why she wanted us to talk. It seemed rather that she didn't want to sacrifice her own time to the task.
Now we walked past it with some sort of shame, as if it were witness to how little we had managed to make the city our own.
There's nothing attractive about disclosing everything to everyone, even to yourself. There has to be some mystery.
Oh, poor woman, my grandmother said, giddy with excitement. Poor old granny.