A home filled with nothing but yourself. It's heavy, that lightness. It's crushing, that emptiness.

The house, and all the objects in it, crackled with static electricity; undertows washed through it, the air was heavy with things that were known but not spoken. Like a hollow log, a drum, a church, it was amplified, so that conversations whispered in it sixty years ago can be half-heard today.

Potential has a shelf life.

Time folds you in its arms and gives you one last kiss, and then it flattens you out and folds you up and tucks you away until it's time for you to become someone else's past time, and then time folds again.

I do have a life,' says Charis, blinking wet eyes.

'You have a rich inner life,' says Tony firmly. 'More than most.

Art is long and life is brief and mortality looms.