I hereby attest I am unable to know what will come next or even what has come next in the past, except to say, I might have thought in a moment of weakness that my English was of a free impulse, I mean my nature, and tender and would therefore pilot me to sustainability and Christendom.

To say that I am exclusively interested in your miseries is true. My mouth, my steer, I have heard that in March all bear cubs are stillborn but their mothers lick them to life. I have learned the way a conversation can stumble in and out of prayer. How, in abandoned bedrooms, there is the sensation that things must still go in order, things next to things, each with its own essence.

Because I am in a region from which, some nights, I can hear the barking of waves, what floats in the blood like a splinter, I am a village without a church. And the dogs lick me, they eye me. I have called on you today because there are questions that beg answering. When I return I will look you up and tell you to meet me at such and such a place; then, upon seeing me, you will employ expressions of concern and in your gentler voice you will say, my dear, you have grown so much faster than your cage.