Every morning I wake up and I tell myself this: It's just one day, one twenty-four-hour period to get yourself through. I don't know when exactly I started giving myself this daily pep talk--or why. It sounds like a twelve-step mantra and I'm not in Anything Anonymous, though to read some of the crap they write about me, you'd think I should be. I have the kind of life a lot of people would probably sell a kidney to just experience a bit of. But still, I find the need to remind myself of the temporariness of a day, to reassure myself that I got through yesterday, I'll get through today.

Standing here, in this quiet house where I can hear the birds chirping out back, I think I’m kind of getting the concept of closure. It’s no big dramatic before-after. It’s more like that melancholy feeling you get at the end of a really good vacation. Something special is ending, and you’re sad, but you can’t be that sad because, hey, it was good while it lasted, and there’ll be other vacations, other good times.

Obey the muse, Liz said. She's a fickle mistress.

As the lightness buoys me, I wonder if maybe she was right. Maybe it's not about looking hot for guys, but about feeling like a place acknowledged you, winked at you, accepted you. It's strange because, of all the people in all the cities, I'd have thought that to Parisians I'd be invisible, but apparently I'm not. Apparently in Paris, not only can I skate, but I practically qualify for the Olympics!

Hate me. Devastate me. Annihilate me. Re-create me. Re-create me. Won't you, won't you won't you re-create me.

Sometimes the wind blows you places you weren't expecting: sometimes it blows you away from those places, too.

Sometimes you can only feel something by its absence. By the empty spaces it leaves behind.