When you know you are dying, self-deceptions fly from your bedside like embers off a bonfire.
Things don't go away. They become you.
Love wasn't a thing you fell in, but rose to. It was what stopped you from falling.
I'd violated the primary rule of junior and senior high-- don't get people talking about you too much. This was wearing the brightest shirt on the playground. This was Mom giving you a kiss in the lobby.
Sometimes one learns too early, as I did, what the world is capable of.
I think each family has a funhouse logic all its own, and in that distortion,in that delusion, all behavior can seem both perfectly normal and crazy.