#Things to consider

  1. To gain approval, to avoid trouble, he had to mirror what was around him: it was how he had tried to win love from his mother as a child. It was a life of perpetual disguise.
  2. My mind struggled to build across the gap, make a new and inhabitable world. The problem was that it had nothing to work with.
  3. The hawk was everything I wanted to be: solitary, self-possessed, free from grief, and numb to the hurts of human life.
  4. In watching the planes, you fly with them and escape. They enlarge your little world and spread it across the seas.
  5. All those thousands upon thousands of photographs my father had taken. Think of them instead. Each one a record, a testament, a bulwark against forgetting, against nothingness, against death.