With the warmth of an alien sun on his back, Jacob took a deep breath at the door and knocked.

How long since he'd been back home? Ten years? Fifteen? He'd stopped keeping track around the time he'd finally stopped looking over his shoulder. At the time, leaving had seemed too good to be true. He'd spent months feeling like he was half a step ahead of some nameless specter; like if he let his guard down, even for a second, whatever it was would drag him right back where he'd come from.

Often I would hear other people ask, __hen will I be normal again?__hat you don__ often hear is a blunt truth: things will never be normal again. Not the __ld" normal at least. You have to invent the new normal.I knew that I needed to take an honest appraisal of my life. Were my problems really bigger than me? Of course not. That__ why I remained in constant motion. Resistance to life__ changes meant death. No matter how depressing and bleak my past looked, I knew that I needed to keep moving and adapting in order to survive.

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

When time passes, it's the people who knew you whom you want to see; they're the ones you can talk to. When enough time passes, what's it matter what they did to you?

Reachable, near and not lost, there remained in the midst of the losses this one thing: language. It, the language, remained, not lost, yes, in spite of everything. But it had to pass through its own answerlessness, pass through frightful muting, pass through the thousand darknesses of deathbringing speech. It passed through and gave back no words for that which happened; yet it passed through this happening. Passed through and could come to light again, __nriched_ by all this.