Of all the priceless objects left behind, this is what we rescue. These artifacts. Memory cues. Useless souvenirs. Nothing you could auction. The scars left from happiness.

To repeat, the way you get to the huge, impossible yes is, you start collecting a lot of easy, small yeses.

I write because it's a way of presenting something without having to be there.

No matter how careful you are, there's going to be the sense you missed something, the collapsed feeling under your skin that you didn't experience it all. There's that fallen heart feeling that you rushed right through the moments where you should've been paying attention. Well, get used to that feeling. That's how your whole life will feel some day.

My stories tend to bring people from isolation into community - with at least one other person, usually with a whole community of people - so that they find themselves accepted back by a world that they kind of fled from.

Fertility says, "Can you relax and just let things happen?" I ask, does she mean, like disasters, like pain, like misery? Can I just let all that happen? "And Joy," she says, "and Serenity, and Happiness, and Contentment." She says all the wings of the Columbia Memorial Mausoleum. "You don't have to control everything," she says. "You can't control everything." But you can be ready for disaster. A sign goes by saying, Buckle Up. "If you worry about disaster all of the time, that's what you are going to get," Fertility says.

They assume she was once gorgeously beautiful. Because now she looks so—bad.