I am in my bed, and it feels like a raft being pulled behind a boat. I am flying across waves churned up in the wake, and I am afraid, but that is the element I remember as my music. Knowledge, I can’t say I acquired much, and then there is the forgetting. I held Primrose’s hand and said I think I’m afraid, and she thought I meant of death, but I was talking about my life as a pink ball rolling across the sidewalks of New York. The walls you bounce off tell you the size of your ambition and send you racing like a salmon to the planet where you were born. As I lay dying, I remembered my mother’s voice like the anthem of my first school. Mama, Mama, I said, calling the woman who could not tell the difference between our smells and whom I therefore had to leave. In fairy tales, people are warned against the temptations they can’t resist and then are turned into a pillar of salt, or a deer, or a swan. We’re not supposed to want to fall, but I found it thrilling not being attached to anything. People said I was beautiful, but I didn’t know the difference between the mirror and an empty book. That’s where I wanted to end up: in a house of unmeaning. I have to laugh at the white room my mind was becoming. What use is furniture when you no longer know how to sit but hover on the verge of being a page you are finally ready to write on? We don’t know who we are. It isn’t a human capacity, so you might as well wish for a golden beak to sprout from the parrot colored feathers on your face. A crest is rising, and it’s the tide of my blood. Even as a young girl, my eyebrows knit as if seeking each other consolation. Then I felt myself becoming liquid.