[...] I was a shop girl, not a poet. In an inexplicable way, I savored my ordinariness, my affinity with the office girls and waitresses I had briefly moved among. My livid past still lingered about me, but faintly, like the roar inside a seashell, and my longing for it was a dull arrhythmic spasm, or murmur, in the meat of my functioning heart. Sometimes, in certain pictures, I thought I could see this hollow phantom world tingle in the air around me, making you want to look at the picture, sensing something you can’t see. In these pictures, I was what I had once longed for: a closed door you couldn’t open, with music and footsteps behind it. I was holding Ava’s hand, but I was turned toward Pia, and the fire of her eyes was reflected in mine.