Normally I would post this as a “First Line” and make it pretty, like a meme. But it wasn’t the first line, exactly, that I wanted to feature, here, as it is the first paragraph that is notable, as a whole. And it would not fit in a neat, little, pretty box (literally, digitally). To be honest, I am still near the beginning of this book (despite my goal of being done with it tomorrow) and I have yet to decide what rating to give it. But I do think it’s worth our time to pause here over the first bit and consider what we can enjoy about it and also learn from it. (trigger warning: suicide)

“The first winter she was dead it seemed every day for months on end was damp and bright–it had always just rained, but I could never remember the rain–and I took the train down to the city a few days a week, searching (it seemed) for a building I might enter and fall from, a task about which I could never quite determine my own sincerity, as it seemed to me the seriousness of anyone looking for such a thing could not be understood until a body needed to be scraped from the sidewalk. With all the recent attacks, of course, security has tightened everywhere, and you had to have permission or an invitation to enter any building, and I never had such things, as I was no one in particular, un-called for. One and a half people kill themselves in the city each day, and I looked for them–the one person or the half person–but I never saw the one and I never saw the half, no matter how much I looked and waited, patiently, so patiently, and after some time I wondered if I could not find them because I was one of them, either the one or the half” (p7).