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Also, I don't like the word priceless.
It's an adjective, I said. I didn't want to say that I had learned the word from the television commercials for Mastercard when I had first arrived in America.
I know, I know, Nikolai said. But it's a derivative of a revolting noun. Like marrying a toad for unseemly gain. It comes at a price.
Everything comes at a price, can we not say that? I said. The flowers on the table, the photos in the frames, the stuffed penguins—forty-one of them—cuddled together, a livable life, an inevitable death, sorrow and stoicism, fear and despair. A self that, too close to one, does not stand self-injuring scrutiny; a self, too far removed, becomes a phantom limb.
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