I believe we recover from loss by facing the loss, grieving, going deep inside ourselves (hopefully with a guide) and re-emerging to live and love again.

In Mexico people wear hummingbird amulets around their necks to show they are searching for love. Here people pretend that they aren’t. Searching.

My heart is a teacup with hairline cracks. I feel like I have to walk real carefully so it won't get shaken and just all shatter and break.

Under the pink Harlequin sunglasses strawberry dangling charms, and sugar-frosted eyeshadow she was really almost beautiful.

She began to feel like the plastic doll she had been named after, without even a hole where her mouth was supposed to be.

She went out in the city with its lights like a radioactive phosphorescence, wandered through galleries where the high-priced art on the walls was the same as the graffiti scrawled outside by taggers who were arrested or killed for it, went to parties in hotel rooms where white-skinned, lingerie-clad rock stars had been staying the night their husbands shot themselves in the head, listened to music in nightclubs where stunning boyish actors had OD'd on the pavement.

Maybe her own tears were the poison that made her grow.