But she did love him. I believe it. I know exactly how that is. To love somebody who doesn't deserve it. Because they are all you have. Because any attention is better than no attention.

Decisions are beautiful. They are the evidence of thought and care. Decisions are the polishing cloths of life.

He's a really nice guy, if only I weren't me.

So we can be filled with holes and loss and wide expanses of unhealed geography - and we can also be excited by life and in love and content at the exact same moment.

Time moves only forward, never back. We look forward to a moment and then it arrives and an instant later it is gone. Like something on the surface of a river that we reached for but did not touch in time and it carried on, away. You cannot be a prisoner of your past against your will. Because you can only live in the past inside your mind.

And I tend to listen to NPR when I'm not writing.

Our lives are one endless stretch of misery punctuated by processed fast foods and the occasional crisis or amusing curiosity.