I know what I saw. No one believes me, but there it is: whenever I close my eyes, whenever the tv programme breaks for commercials. It stares back at me through the corridor of memory. And I have to bear it alone, the burden of remembering. The burden of knowing, of being the only one who knows, is claustrophobic. There's no one here with me... just it.

It must know.

• Excerpt from a Dear John letter written from Mrs. Katherine Tully, ex-wife to Senator Tully.

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I went back there... back to the library. I watched the outside of the building for a few minutes. I know it is still in there. It knows now too.

How can they have let me come back? I thought the bars meant something. Meant that they understood somehow. Meant that they would teach me how to tell it no, no more.

I felt it today again. It is starting all over. Oh God! oh god if you are out there help me with this one, last thing.

• From a letter signed John Borie Ryerson and mailed six years after his suicide.

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I hate it when shit gets curious. Nine times out of ten, some s.o.b. gets home and find his wife with some other guy. He offs her, she offs him. Whatever. But, there's lots of blood and footprints and I get to go home early. But when it's curious. Then I have to stick around, and clean up the mess. And, this one's curious. Let me tell you. Nothing to find but those marks on the walls. Thought they was marked with blood, like some serial fuck. ... But forensics says it isn't blood...

• Lt. Bruley talking off the record to Anna Chang about the murders in Jamaica Plain.

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if you’re not buyin’, i mean your gucci tie, prada shoes, your fuckin’ beamer- you’re nothin’. nothin’ to ‘em. alls i buy is smokes. an when i look at you, you pretend i’m not here- but im a real person to, dam it. but not bein real has its uses too, see? I see things you wouldn’t believe. I know about the lights. i see the cameras. i see them watchin an even they don’t see me. You can keep your fancy shoes an car. i’m invisible. an when they come, you’ll be, like WHEE-OOO, right there man.

alls i need is a smoke. heh. heh.

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Every day we come a little closer - mother who can never know motherhood guessing at the truth, child who will never be a child whole and beating inside her, both screaming in a place they will keep secret forever.

I find it difficult to remember anything of the time before, when I was small, pink, weak; but the memories are unwelcome. Look at me now. Am I not beautiful? Am I not Becoming?

The pain is terrible. But it is mine

• from three spiral-bound diaries found beneath Haymarket MBTA platform

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The Nantucket shore finally faded into something indistinct, somewhere between vision and imagination. Can I really have left?

A little way down the deck a boy and his grandfather wave an adventurous goodbye to the land. They watch the land. I watch them. The boy is too young to have much of a past, the man too old to have much of a future.

They begin to turn in my direction. I turn to leave. They don’t deserve to see me now, when they are so happy, when they have so much to lose.

I should take off my wedding ring. Time is running out.