Hello, my name is ees Lebkuchen Spice, and I vant to show you my coooooookies.

I had always felt that mittens were a few steps back on the evolutionary scale-- why, I wondered, would we want to make ourselves into a less agile version of lobster.

People are always separable.

This isn't even something I've feared, because I never knew it was a possibility.

If you tell me, I will leave you alone," I said. "And if you don't tell me, I am going to grab the nearest ghostwritten James Patterson romance novel and I am going to follow you through this store reading it out loud until you relent. Would you prefer me to read from Daphne's Three Tender Months with Harold or Cindy and John's House of Everlasting Love? I guarantee, your sanity and your indie street cred won't last a chapter. And they are very, very short chapters." Now I could see the fright beneath the defiance.

healthy, adj. There are times when I'm alone that I think, This is it. This is actually the natural state. All I need are my thoughts and my small acts of creation and my ability to go or do whatever I want to go or do. I am myself, and that is the point. Pairing is a social construction. It is by no means necessary for everyone to do it. Maybe I'm better like this. Maybe I could live my life in my own world, and then simply leave it when it's time to go.

But death is not freedom. For a moment, it can look like freedom. But then it's death. Anything. Something. Nothing.