Is it needy? It's not. We don't need each other. We just really, really enjoy each other. And we're good together. We're good people together. And I have the funniest feeling. I can really, truly touch this all, this happiness and the sadness too, I can trace all of it with my fingers. It isn't theoretical or distant. This feels like me. This is me. I love him, and, for the first time in a relationship, I also like me. Every time he says "I love you," I answer, "I believe you.

I wouldn't say that my emotions are extreme. I'd say they are committed. My moods are the equivalent of Madonna's dancing: inappropriate but all-out. If I'm going to be sad, I might as well be the saddest a girl can get. And if I'm happy, I want to be the happiest. The trouble is, I feel highs so ecstatic that just being normal feels like a thousand-mile drop and being unhappy is excruciating.

A lot of the time in my recurring dreams, before I was diagnosed, iconic people would either be good or evil figures. I remember dreaming really basic stuff like trying to navigate the London underground, but then Paul Newman would be the only one who would direct me to the right trains. And I'm trying to remember who would direct me to the wrong ones.

You can have this kind of love. You can have it. You just grab it. Of course the problem with having that love is that you can lose it, too.

He was addicted to me and now he has gone cold turkey. He used to send me fifty texts a day. And now he is ignoring me. It's like I was once his Barack Obama. And now I am John McCain, conceding defeat like a sad-face sock puppet, knowing I have sold the best of myself. He, my electorate, not only does not want me, he actively feels pity.

We intersect. He says he thanks every star that we existed on the same celestial plain. But here we are on earth, dirty, well used, a man-made throughway for intersecting dreams.

Your own love story? Your paramour may have had lovers before you. But no one has ever loved him the way you do. No one has ever heard music. Not the way you hear it. The songs are beautiful vampires, asleep in your iPod, coming alive at night, aglow. You can have them on your hours, yours to conduct. Music shapes us and we shape it.