Every life I start with her, my original sin. I know myself through her.

I'm dying with you before I'm living without you.

I look back on my 20s. It's supposed to be the prime of your life, the most vital, the most beautiful. But you're making your critical decisions and sometimes your most critical mistakes.

Exactly! We run or we lose ourselves in something, somebody, anything to try and ease our pain.

Developing characters is a strange thing. In the beginning they are abstract and I wonder how to move on from there.

It was frustrating when people loved you and took an interest in you and sometimes worried about you and personally cared what you did with yourself. Lena wished that love were something you could flip on and off. You could turn it on when you felt good bout yourself and worthy of it and generous enough to return it. You could clip it off when you needed to hide or self-destruct and had nothing at all to give." (Lena, 194)

You surround yourself with your pain or you avoid it and let it find you when you are trying to do other things