You wouldn't match Melanie and me up, and if we hadn't gotten stuck together as lab partners in junior high science, I doubt if we'd have matched us up either. I'm not sure why we even stuck, except that we each probably find the other to be entertaining...Besides I feel like it was a personal mission of mine to broaden Melanie's world, though I think she felt the same for me.

No, Mom. I said fine." "It's just your tone." Ah, yes- the tone. The nasty traitor.

When what you want is a relationship, and not a person, get a dog.

The world was large, so large. Bigger than it had been before. Family, too, a bigger word. That felt like a good thing. An essential thing. There was power in numbers.

The loneliness you feel with another person, the wrong person, is the loneliest of all.

But then there are the van Goghs and Hemingways and Mozarts, those who feel a hunger so deep, so far down, that greatness lies there too, nestled somewhere within it. Those who get their inner voice and direction from the cool mysterious insides of the moon, and not from the earth like the rest of us.

Sometimes you can cattle rope your heart and sometimes you can't, is all.