I force my eyes upward and look at Mia for the first time. She's still beautiful. Not in an obvious Vanessa LeGrande or Bryn Shraeder kind of way. In a quiet way that's always been devastating to me. Her hair, long and dark, is down now, swimming damply against her bare shoulders, which are still milky white and covered with the constellation of freckles that I used to kiss. The scar on her left shoulder, the one that used to be an angry red weld is silvery pink now. Almost like the latest rage in tattoo accessories. Almost pretty.

And then Adam Wilde shows up at Carnegie Hall on the biggest night of my career, and it felt like more than a coincidence. It felt like a gift. From them. For my first recital ever, they gave me a cello. And for this one, they gave me you.

The line between true self and feigned self is blurred on all sides. Which I think is a rather handy metaphor for falling in love.

I can keep picking small fights, or brave the big one. Time to screw my courage. Or go down trying.

I am adrenaline slammed into inertia: a fast car stuck in traffic.

Even if you find him. Even if he didn’t leave you on purpose, he can’t possibly live up to the person you’ve built him into.

When you make such a large withdrawal of happiness, somewhere you'll have to make an equally large deposit. It all goes back to the universal law of equilibrium.