Sometimes you cry, Susie, even when someone you love has been gone a long time.

Your first kiss is destiny knocking.

Hold still," my father would say, while I held the ship in the bottle and he burned away the strings he'd raised the mast with and set the clipper ship free on its blue putty sea. And I would wait for him, recognizing the tension of that moment when the world in the bottle depended, solely, on me.

When the music stopped, it could have been forever since we'd begun. My grandfather took a step back, and the light grew yellow at his back. 'I'm going,' he said. 'Where?' I asked. 'Don't worry, sweetheart. You're so close.' He turned and walked away, disappearing rapidly into spots and dust. Infinity.

I'm not a slash-and-burn kind, and I'm also not a posterity kind. They just kind of exist on my hard drive. It's like walking down the street - what you leave behind is still there, even if you never go back and revisit it.

Learn a language of another country and then you can go to that country: a place where the problems of your family will not follow. A language they do not speak.

The damage can fester under layers of time and change, and an ignorant, thoughtless remark can easily reopen the wound.