I saw the movie, he said. I know what it's about. Listen to this. When girls get to be about twelve or so - he leaned toward us - their tits bleed.

We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.

Grief is natural,' she said. 'Overcoming it is a matter of choice.

Everyone struggles against despair, but it always wins in the end. It has to. It's the thing that lets us say goodbye.

On their best days, writers all over the world are winning Pulitzers, all alone in their studios, with no one watching.

The world, a tired performer, offers us another half-assed season.

It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out of those rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will never find the pieces to put them back together.