There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room.

I took a deep breath and listened to the old brag of my heart.
I am, I am, I am

Cal hadn't wanted to swim, he had wanted to talk, and we were arguing about this play where a young man finds out he has a brain disease, on account of his father fooling around with unclean women, and in the end his brain, which has been softening all along, snaps completely, and his mother is debating whether to kill him or not.

'Do you know what a poem is, Esther?'
'No, what?' I would say.
'A piece of dust.'
Then, just as he was smiling and starting to look proud, I would say, 'So
are the cadavers you cut up. So are the people you think you're curing.
They're dust as dust as dust. I reckon a good poem last a whole lot
longer than a hundred of those people put together.'
And of course Buddy wouldn't have any answer to that, because what I
said was true. People were made of nothing so much as dust, and I
couldn't see that doctoring all that dust was a bit better than writing
poems people would remember and repeat to themselves when they
were unhappy or sick or couldn't sleep.

Maybe forgetfullness, like a kind snow, should numb and cover them.
But they were part of me. They were my landscape.