It's the secret smile you get from knowing that, somewhere, there is someone who is yours. Not in the sense that you own her or control her. She is yours because you can say anything to her, whenever you need to. And she can do the same, whenever she needs to.

detachment, n. Even when I detach, I care. You can be separate from a thing and still care about it.

The tenderness between two people can turn the air tender, the room tender, time itself tender. As I step out of bed and slip on an oversize shirt, everything around me feels like it's the temperature of happiness.

There are few things harder than being born into the wrong body.

I think that if you were somehow able to measure the weight of human kindness, it would have weighed more on 9/11 than it ever had. On 9/11, all the hatred and murder could not compare with the weight of love, of bravery, of caring. I have to believe that.

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.

It's hard to answer a question you haven't been asked. It's hard to show you tried unless you end up succeeding.