With some break-ups, all you can think about afterwards is how badly it ended and how much the other person hurt you. With others, you become sentimental for the good times and lose track of what went wrong.

Even if you were green and had a beard and a male appendage between your legs. Even if your eyebrows were orange and you had a mole covering your entire cheek and a nose that poked me in the eye every time I kissed you. Even if you weighed seven hundred pounds and had hair the size of a Doberman under your arms. Even then, I would love you.

Maybe there is hope in the fragments, that what is lost can always be filled in by someone who knows.

I want my own books to have their own shelves," you said, and that's how I knew it would be okay to live together.

After tiny has tried ballerina pose, swing-batter-batter pose, pump-up-the-jam pose, and top-of-the-mountain-sound-of-music pose in the reflection of the bean, he walks us to a bench overlooking lake shore drive.

In the next election, I'm voting for your mom to be the next God.

And I'm moved, it's so beautiful. Not what I wrote, but to have it given back like this. To have her remember the words and the tune. To hear it in her voice.