The thing to understand about Ciaran is not only that he was exceptionally beautiful, but that there was an immense stillness radiating from his body. The stillness was beneath every gesture, his glances, his laughs.
-- Narrator (April, 2012)

Importance: This moment marks the cliché meet-cute, a moment, however, that disturbs. The narrator, looking back from her perspective in Athens five years later, recounts the dimensions of her initial response. The trajectory of the narrator’s obsession begins from this first accidental glance at Ciaran. At the time Ciaran is a complete stranger who is visiting a sculpture exhibit that the narrator attends largely for the open bar. Ciaran enters the narrative then not as a character, not even a person, but rather as a perception, an embodiment of a concept. The over-the-top description, the use of baggy, spacious abstracts, is not for the squeamish. This passage defies traditional language of lovers’ initial meeting. The...