Hal

It all started when he would appear on lonely and rainy Saturday afternoons, emerging from the shadows of Chloe's living room/kitchen (she refused to turn on lights in the daytime). His name was Hal. He would come and sit next to her on her couch and listen to what she had to say about things. And they were nice, these visits. Because she could tell him anything and he would listen.
Then, Hal began accompanying her on random errands. He would appear on a subway platform and talk to her about music, about Nick Drake and forgotten songs. Then, conveniently, he would disappear when she couldn't pay attention to him, like when she was shopping for fruit at the market, for instance (it took some concentration to find untouched cherries on Grand Street at the end of the day).
Later, at home again, he would reappear, assuring and dependable, even when they had nothing to say to each other; keeping each other company in that full and satisfying silence that only kindred spirits can share.

marionette

Most days, now more than ever, she felt herself hovering over her marionette likeness. In her own sky of illustrious cloud and cerebral sun, she pulled this or that string with her eyes closed, her doppelganger interacting in perfect symbiosis, because she knew the choreography and the story so well. And it was a perfect decoy; she fooled everyone, not excluding herself.

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/symbiosis

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marionette

sea and shore

Flushed cheeks and unbridled joy. She remembered those few hours in soft, undulating waves, washing warm over her at the edge of an isolated shore. Memories of the still shadows of a Sunday night, of pulsing conversation and blood, flooded the empty conch shell of her soul and washed her back out to her sea.

the tortoise shell

Among the strewn and broken crates and watery fish waste, Chloe ambled on through the darkness that had descended upon Grand Street. She remembered the story about the tortoise who happened to lose its shell and who then, after many moons, happily found it again. Through the red door and into the cement-paved courtyard behind her building, up the steep stairwell, she finally returned to her own shell. Within its walls, alone, stuffing the socks she never wore in the bottom drawer, just like before, and her toothbrush on the second level in the bathroom cabinet, she let her mind wander on through the mists of her memory of childhood. How the mangoes dropped like snowballs onto the roof of their house on Pinta Court. The great banyan trees and the way they swayed before a storm, rustling. She had come home.