Maybe this is not a come-down-from-the-ledge story. But I tell it with the thought that the woman on the ledge will ask herself a question, the question that occurred to that man in Bogota. He wondered how we know that what happens to us isn't good?

I moved through the days like a severed head that finishes a sentence.

Obviously, in journalism, you're confined to what happens. And the tendency to embellish, to mythologize, it's in us. It makes things more interesting, a closer call. But journalism taught me how to write a sentence that would make someone want to read the next one.

The year I began to say vahz instead of vase, a man I barely knew nearly accidentally killed me.

I exaggerated even before I began to exaggerate, because it's true — nothing is ever quite as bad as it could be.

He wondered how we know that what happens to us isn't good.

Look at me. My concerns-are they spiritual, do you think, or carnal? Come on. We've read our Shakespeare.