“No one can keep their eyes on someone every second. You have to
sleep, have to use the bathroom. Need to scrub the bathtub sometime. Have to
slice onions, have to snap off the ends of string beans. Check the air in the tires
of your car. That’s how we left each other. Or, rather, how she left me. There was
always, in the background, the unambiguous shadow of a sailor. A single dark,
autonomous shadow gliding up the wall of a building. Bathtubs, onions, and air
were simply shards of metaphor scattered like thumbtacks by that shadow.”