Painting the Walls White
an excerpt

Yet she had, or did, rather. She thought. Now. Didn’t she? Was she allowed by the harsh, cold presence of modernity to even feel so strongly? It simply was not done in the first quarter of the twenty first century.

People never even fainted with the sublimity of it all anymore. She just did not have the luxury.

While the sublimity of it all -when “it all”was mountains, mysteries, ruined abbeys, or large amounts of dust in old mansions- did seem to be in question, perhaps the sublimity of sentiment was not. Though it was more in fashion to talk of sex than of love -as a way of liberating one’s self, no doubt- the feeling had to still be there, in the same way, and the same intensity. If not for everyone, then uniquely for her. In considering the elation and terror that the scrape of a bearded chin across one’s collar-bone could create, she did not think it impossible, or even improbable. In fact, it may have been utterly, utterly necessary.