Just like any woman,...we weave our stories out of our bodies. Some of us through our children, or our art; some do it just by living. It's all the same.

You always fed strays and bent down to talk to the dogs you met on the street, looking straight into their eyes as if they were old friends. (Maybe they are, you said. From another life.) You liked to go to the pound and look at them. You tried to send them messages of comfort. I couldn’t go because I started crying the one time I tried. All those eyes and the barks like sobs.

If you were a mermaid, you said, If you were a mermaid, I was the sea.

You're meant to have whatever your heart desires. Whatever your heart wants that much is already a part of you.

If Los Angeles is a woman reclining billboard model with collagen-puffed lips and silicone-inflated breasts, a woman in a magenta convertible with heart-shaped sunglasses and cotton candy hair; if Los Angeles is this woman, then the San Fernando Valley is her teenybopper sister. The teenybopper sister snaps bug stretchy pink bubbles over her tongue and checks her lipgloss in the rearview mirror, . . . Teeny plays the radio too loud and bites her nails, wondering if the glitter polish will poison her.

You are so intense. Like a storm. It's shocking how intense you are.

Beauty loved him more than anything, her Beast boy, but, secretly, sometimes, she wished he would have remained a Beast.