Content Warning: This text discusses systemic racism, police violence, and the death of a Black man.

“You lost her gaze for a moment and your breath quickened, as when a dropped call across a distance gains unexpected gravity.”

This quote includes both the theme of The Difference Between Looking and Seeing and the motif of breath. The dropped call simile introduces the possibility of loss and the ease with which the narrator becomes anxious.

“Perhaps it was because you had both lost that year, and though you kept telling yourself you couldn’t lose any more, it continued to happen.”

This sentence uses a polyptoton (repeating the root of the same word in different cases) of “lost” and “lose”, emphasizing the precarity of these two Black people’s wellbeing. It invokes the idea of enduring more than one can bear.

“You create a small world for yourselves, and for you both only, sitting on this sofa, looking out at the world which has a tendency to engulf even the most alive.”

This establishes that the relationship between the narrator and his lover creates a safe zone in a senseless and hostile world. The clarification of “you both only” sets up their connection as unique, presenting them as a unit.