I guess it's a choice we make," she said. "What's a choice?" I asked. And she said, "How much of the world we let in.

We love and we feel and we try and we hope.

I don't even know what I'm looking for, although I hope I'll know it if I find it along the way. Sometimes I want to simplify my life into a simple bare thing. And other times I want to complicate it so thoroughly that everything I touch will become bound in some way to me. I've become quite aware of my contradictions, but there's no true resolution in that.

But I want to feel like life matters. I had something real with you, but then the realness scared me. I decided to go for other things instead.

Readers embrace all kinds of characters as long as they are written with emotional truth.

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 feel such a tenderness for these vulnerable nighttime conversations, the way words take a different shape in the air when there's no light in the room.