"He thinks I suffer from depression. But I'm just quiet. Solitude and depression are like swimming and drowning. In school many years ago, I learned that flowers sometimes unfold inside themselves."
The narrator understands the nuances of her interior life. She is not unhappy so much as self-contained and accustomed to being so. Her life has brought a lot of tragedy which the narrator has internalized, but she is not struggling, like Bruno thinks, just taking a path similar in presentation to that of a depressed person.
"Every moment is the paradox of now or never."
In a sense, this is the crux of Van Booy's stories. He points to how pivotal seemingly unimportant decisions in the middle of the day prove in his characters' lives. They are faced with opportunities to embrace the unknown and change or to reject it and persist in the ordinary. This paradox if essential and constant.
“If there is such a thing as marriage, it takes place long before the ceremony: in a car on the way to the airport; or as a gray bedroom fills with dawn, one lover watching the other; or as two strangers stand together in the rain with no bus in sight, arms weighed down with shopping bags. You don’t know then. But later you realize—that was the moment. And always without words.”
Romantic love is common in these stories of Van Booy. He presents this love as an uncommunicable union, one which just happens between to people. Consistent with the other themes of the book, he portrays this a spontaneous event which happens to overtake someone and to change them if only they're willing.
"'See -- this book belongs to you,' Hannah said sweetly.
'No young lady,' the birdman said, 'It belongs to you -- but you don't belong to it.'
He leaned in very close to her.
'You belong to you,' he said."
The birdman offers Hannah a chance to be free of her past, of her brother's death. He quietly confirms that he is not the brother whom she lost, but that this still may be the day when she can regain autonomy over herself and her ambitions. She doesn't need to hold onto that book as if she owed it and the memories behind it anything anymore. She's just Hannah.
