The badgering put her in a mood to peel the skin off fruit, to tell him she was walking along the shoreline when someone called out her name from the cliffs and when she turned around all she saw were stars bounding around so slowly in the heavens you might have missed their movement entirely if not for the sounds they made, the whistling and the exhalations. She said our minds form themselves of something other than the matter from which everything else emerges. The wicker furniture, the albatross on the wing. But this doesn’t mean they ought to seem other. All such boundaries are transcended by the notion of boundaries itself and the harder we exert ourselves in the attempt to preserve them, the more stubbornly they dissolve. Then turn up again, partially formed, around the corner. One day, she cut holes in the sheet they kept over the window to better allow the breeze to get through and subsequently those on the opposite side of the street began to squint, pulled out their phones and started clicking. This is probably why he left, why he packed the car and drove for an hour and then another and so on until they had stacked up on one another like a child’s plastic blocks and when it was all finished he sent her a postcard that had a picture of a pinniped on the front of it, baring its yellow teeth in what we were supposed to imagine was a friendly manner. But our take on the situation has already been explained. We never meant to interfere so much as insist on our own relevance precisely when the question of that relevance had become so unimportant, had been outflanked, as it were, by one involving the age of the sewer system, say, or the manner in which one person deceives another when there is no reason to, when all things being equal, the truth would have sufficed. Her reaction is the same as when they first met, when she looked at him as if he were so far away she couldn’t make out a single detail. Not the contours of the face, not the lint stuck to the arm of his jacket as if it had been placed there strategically, by someone (she knew now) with a flair for the mundane, and maybe an appointment in an hour to get the radiator in his car replaced or a foreboding dark spot excised permanently from the  skin.