''I care to remember but you've always avoided the issue. I even changed tactics. I stopped mentioning it, hoping that you'd suggest we move in together in your own time. But you never did. Now it's too late for temporary measures. It's too late to dip your toe in and check the water temperature. It's all or nothing. Now or never.''
Still, you resist; it's hard to despise your own substance, you'd like to stop all this, give yourself time to think about it and listen without difficulty to your heartbeat, but it's too late for that. This thing can never stop.
"My, how foolish I am!" my friend cries, suddenly alert, like a woman remembering too late she has biscuits in the owen. "You know what I've always thought?" she asks in a tone of discovery, and not smiling at me but a point beyond. "I've always thought a body would have to be sick and dying before they saw the Lord. And I imagined that when it came it would be like looking at the Baptist window: pretty as coloured glass with the sun pouring through, such a shine you don't know it's getting dark. And it's been a coloured glass with the sun pouring through, such a spooky feeling. But I'll wager it never happens. I'll wager at the very end a body realizes that the Lord has already shown Himself. That things as they are" - her hand circles in a gesture that gathers clouds and kites and grass and Queenie pawing earth over her bone - "just what they've always seen, was seeing Him. As for me, I could leave the world with today in my eyes.