From a Distance, Spooky Action

Listen to me—

We die a thousand separate times before the end of every day—each decision peels another version of reality from our bones.
  And those are the real ghosts—the different versions of us haunting the crawl spaces of our memory. And by the time we reach a certain age we’ve died so many times that we can’t quite tell which renditions are real and which were are the possibilities that we’ve been sloughing off since the day we came out wet and wailing. Since then, we’ve been dying every day.
  The dying stopped for me the moment I fell from the roof—clearing out the gutters at the end of autumn, taking big mucky handfuls of leaves and throwing them two stories down, watching the clumps break apart and flutter listlessly before they landed. Clyff was inside doing God knows what in the basement lab he’d set up for himself, and Barkley was fussing and howling in pursuit of . . .
. . . . . . .
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