from Belinda McKeon's Tender

Songs that had the exact shape of your heartbreak: they were the songs you had to cross the room to turn off.

Waking and saying to the morning, Please do not get any worse.
But you could not reason with a morning. A morning was not a thing that had to give anything beyond what it was.

And the music like a shimmering, oceanic wall. [...]
Singing of mystery, of the mystery that life was. [...]
And no, but really, had all these songs always been so brilliant, all along? These songs that had been only tinny radio rackets in your childhood, and only things you thought embarrassing in your teenage years, and now—now they were genius. Now they were perfect.
Was this just irony, this dancing, this sheer, sheer happy love, now, or was this honesty? [...]
Were you meant to actually know which one it was? [...]
(And how many other songs were there from your childhood that turned out to be so much about your life? Not just your life, but everybody's life? Everybody's happiness? Everybody's love?)

In the backyard of Baggot Street, a feral cat close to giving birth. Dragging herself around. The noise of her. Trying, as they watched from the steps, to burrow into a tangle of ivy. 
"She's trying to get away from the pain of it," Cillian said. "She doesn't understand it's inside of her."
Catherine stared at him. Could that be true? Could that possibly, possibly, be true?

(But even if you went into the farthest waters, from the farthest tip, someone would find you eventually. And then someone would have to see.)

[...] years passed, and the surreal, more and more, was simply the real.