Live free or die.

It [death] isn't an infection, she said. She might be right. Then again, we've nested in the walls like bacteria. We've taken over the house, its insulation and its plumbing —we've made it our own.

Or maybe it's life that it's the infection: a feverish dream, a hallucination of feelings. Death is purification, a cleansing, a cure.

And for a moment―for a split second―everything else falls away, the whole pattern and order of my life, and a huge joy crests in my chest. I am no one, and I owe nothing to anybody, and my life is my own.

Of course. That's what people do in a disordered world, a world of freedom and choice: they leave when they want. They disappear, they come back, they leave again. And you are left to pick up the pieces on your own.

Maybe before you die, it's your ghosts you see.

With the cure, relationships are all the same, and rules and expectations are defined. Without the cure, relationships must be reinvented every day, languages constantly decoded and deciphered. Freedom is exhausting.