(After meeting her birth mother after more than 40 years) We exchange bunches of orchids, laughing at the coincidence of the flowers. A little unnerving: I wonder if that choice has anything to do with genetics. ... I want to take mine home and look after them so that they live for days. I might spray the leaves, and make sure they sit in an easterly window, and keep them out of the direct sun.

These days I can't tell what I really feel.

(After meeting her birth mother after more than 40 years) We exchange bunches of orchids, laughing at the coincidence of the flowers. A little unnerving: I wonder if that choice has anything to do with genetics. ... I want to take mine home and look after them so that they live for days. I might spray the leaves, and make sure they sit in an easterly window, and keep them out of the direct sun.

Sometimes you remember your life in photographs that were never taken.

How blazing and alive the past is. The color of the wallpaper in the bedroom you had as a girl. It's not so much that you've lost your memory, more like you're submerged in it, like you're living in the brightly vivid underwater world of the past.

Loss isn't an absence after all. It is a presence. A strong presence right next to me. I look at it. It doesn't look like anything, that's what is so strange. It just fits in.

Nearly dying brings you closer to living. There's a thin border; you feel yourself cross it, going back to the land of the living, going home. Perhaps, if you'd gone the other way, death would have been a different home.