The specific bitter first sip of coffee made the way I liked it.

The weight of a good book in my hands and a whole free afternoon to fall into it.

My sister’s laugh across the small room.

These were not extraordinary things; they were the most ordinary things in the world, the things I had let stream past me unnoticed for twenty-two years while I was busy being furniture — and dying gave them back to me at full volume, made each one land like the first and last of its kind.

There is a cruelty in that, and there is a gift in it, and I have stopped trying to separate the two.

I would rather have had these months awake than the decades I slept through, and I know how strange that sounds, and I mean it without a trace of bravery.