Summary

Chapter 21 opens with narrator and her brother having a long conversation on the beach. She thinks about the “repetition, like a ritual of waves” (145). They talk about Jonás and Ana; they laugh and cry. She longs for Jonás and claims that her notebook can record the sound of the sea. She thinks about beauty in horrible things.

In Chapter 22, the narrator is home and writing in pencil because the lines of the notebook and the pencil “have the same tone” (149). She thinks that “all stories are a deep ocean and a puddle at the same time” (151).

In Chapter 23, she considers that that she has never had an electric pencil sharpener and how that once represented adult life for her. The narrator thinks about music and the sea and swimming without knowing which direction one is going in. She thinks about how...