But what if Shakespeare― and Hamlet― were asking the wrong question? What if the real question is not whether to be, but how to be?

But it's a big ocean. It's an even bigger world. And maybe we've gotten as close as we're supposed to get.

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!

Part of me knows one more day won't do anything except postpone the heartbreak. But another part of me believes differently. We are born in one day. We die in one day. We can change in one day. And we can fall in love in one day. Anything can happen in just one day.

Pictures can be pretty deceptive.

Because that day with Willem, I may have pretended to be someone named Lulu, but I had never been more honest in my life. Maybe that's the thing with liberation. It comes at a price.

If I felt like a fish out of water in my family, I felt like a fish on Mars in Adam’s circle.