Please Mia," he implores. "Don't make me write a song.

Doubt is part of searching. Same as faith.

Sleep would be so welcome. A warm blanket of black to erase everything else. Sleep without dreams.

In the calculus of feelings, you never really know how one person's absence will affect you more than another's.

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.

And our lips. There isn't enough skin, enough spit, enough time, for the lost years that our lips are trying to make up for as they find each other. We kiss. The electric current switches to high. The lights throughout all of Brooklyn must be surging.

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?