I've worn black today, because I've heard so often that it's supposed to be slimming. But instead I am this sphere of darkness submarining through the halls.

She stays in the same spot, anchored by the profound, desperate loneliness of a bad relationship.

There is certainty in a ring. The non-ending, the non-beginning. The ongoing. The way it holds on to you not because it's fastened or stretched or adhered. It holds on because it fits.

Belonging. Togetherness. These words are as complicated and confusing as the word love. It’s probably all the same thing. Or it would be if we let it be. I can only guess from observation.

But I still has enough longing for that concept that I didn't want to dispel it completely. Meaning: I didn't want to tell Lily that I felt we'd all been duped by Plato and the idea of a soul mate. Just in case it turned out that she was mine.

That no matter what i did, I would always be missing something else. And the only way to live, the only way to be happy, was to make sure the things I didn't miss meant more to me than the things I missed.

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.