This is the good news: I live. Don't roll your eyes. Don't take this for granted. It may not seem like much, after all that is about to happen, but it will: it will take on a shape and a weight of its own. It is not too much to ask for, but it is too much to expect.

...

I came here not for a man but the idea of a man, and now that he has proven himself no more than that, I am slowing down, losing my center: This has alwasy been my problem, that I am nothing but a moon, a body built for revolving around another. Now that he is leaving, I can feel myself skipping my orbit, losing gravity, coasting my way into space. And while I wait for him to realize that he does not love me, I count off the days, and wait. This is what I have always excelled at: reacting to a void. So I spin and spin, farther out than last time, until one of these days I am going to spin into nothingness.

...

Once I bought a microwave at P.C. Richard’s and Sons, and while buying it became friendly with the salesman. When I told him I was calling a car service to take my purchase home, he insisted that he drive me — he was getting off a shift, he said, I was on his way. It would save me $15. Idling at a red light on Flatbush Avenue, he told me that selling microwaves was his second job, a nights and weekends job, which supplemented the income he earned as a transit cop, which meant he had a gun in his glove compartment. So there I was, alone in a car with a man and his gun, with a microwave on my lap. I had him drop me off five blocks from my apartment, and told him that I was moving to Italy in two weeks, that the microwave was a birthday present for my boyfriend. This is just to illustrate that when I used to say I had trust problems, they were not what you would have expected.

...

He will go to jail, the man from the park. He is not a criminal mastermind. You hear the contempt in my voice, and I do have contempt for him, being so inept. Closet walls are thin, and each dosage of gamma hydroxybutyrate, which is what I will be told he added to my Diet Coke and then asked me to swallow at intervals, lasts only four hours. It was not until police unearthed the bodies of five other girls beneath the floorboards of his father’s cheese shop in Oakland that I will began to feel something I identify as respect.

It is not, I admit, as exotic as being taped up in blankets and dropped down a well in a Connecticut forest. It does not allow for the play of shadow and light on the walls of a stone well constructed as a hiding place for escaped slaves moving north to Canada on the Underground Railroad. But it is the truth, unvarnished. The only thing I will talk about for four years. Some other girls, I know, remain mute, but not me. I will stop going to work, stop eating, stop walking alone after dark, before dark — but talking is something I will continue to do. Night after night, and Rebecca, I believe, will take notes. It is all hers, the artistry of it; I will simply explaine to her when to be terrified and when to be tired and when to be bored. She will widen it, broaden it, make it a story of redemption, of triumph over adversity, a story of three girls from the country who suffer in the city and find solace in each other. There will be one scene, where we are young again, sitting on a river’s bank beneath a full moon, and I think what she says is that our agape “stilled the stars,” which is a stupid thing to say, since stars are fixed, maybe, in a local sense but subject to galactic motion on a macro level. To still the stars would be to reach absolute zero, less a temperature than a state of being, the state in which matter is motionless. Absolute zero, metaphorically speaking, would come soon enough.