Here, kitty, kitty, Chico says. The cover of his cage is still on, making his tiny clown voice slightly muffled. I feel bad for him under there, just waiting to start his evil little day...Freud walks toward Chico in his slinky fashion, sits under his cage and just stares. We have satanic pets...our pets seem to have made a pact with the devil.

In the middle of the night I am awakened by a sound. I sit up abruptly in bed. I hear it again. It's music. Wait, it sounds like the ice cream man, in our house. Is this some kind of twisted nightmare? The flipping ice cream man, breaking in to chop us all up in our beds to the tune of 'Zippity Do Dah'?... My heart slows. I remember. There is no psycho ice cream man here. It is just our new musical soap dispenser.

Cars are all jammed up all along the road and a light turns red and someone honks. In every one of those cars there is a story or a hundred stories. For every light on in al of those huge city buildings there is a story. No one knows what I am about to face and no one knows my story and neither do I right then.

I shouldn't have to be a liar to make someone love me. I shouldn't be so afraid of losing someone that I'll do anything to make them stay.

Maybe it was wrong, or maybe impossible, but I wanted the truth to be one thing. One solid thing.

You were supposed to have hope, right? You were supposed to respect its power and hold on. And so I did. I held, and held, and let hope fill me. But as the days went on, it seemed I could be holding for a long, long time. Hope could be the most powerful thing or the most useless

The romantic element is what the story Essential Maps for the Lost, sort of sits on, but all the stuff below the surface is really about family. It's about the baggage we bring, both the good and the hard stuff in that baggage. It's more about the other relationships. It's about mothers and fathers and sisters and dogs, all of the pieces. It's really more about - yes, love, in its widest usage.