Excerpt: The Woman Who Loved Van Gogh

She watched the rain and remembered something else she had read. How water was the most perfectly recycled thing. Every drop that exists is the same water that existed from the beginning of time. Every tear that had ever been shed, every drop of blood that had ever fallen into the ground, it was all there still, all here still, never leaving earth, only recycling again and again carried on the clouds from nation to nation, spreading again through the veins of time. The water she drank, the water that ran and coursed through the rivers and island inside her body, the water that fell now in the lonely rain, every drop the same that had always been.
So her love was not impossible then, although she knew it was strange, knew she was strange. It was not impossible that she should love him was it? Perhaps some part of him had been with her all along. She reached her hand to the window, its cold touch upon her fingertips. In the dim reflection of the glass she could see her own face looking back. Plain, simple and scarred. She reached up and touched her cheek, the side of her face puckered and burned from a fire she had no memory off, but from which she had never escaped living with its evidence on her skin since childhood.