Best friends are always together, always whispering and laughing and running, always at each other's house, having dinner, sleeping over. They are practically adopted by each other's parents. You can't pry them apart.

Why do we wrap things? Usually to protect them. The more fragile they are, the more important the wrapping. Your dream is prey to many perils. It may shatter under the blows of criticism, evaporate with competition's heat, sink to the bottomless depths of others' indifference. Tend to your dream. Protect it as you would a fallen nestling. Until the day when it—and you—will fly.

Write what you care about. If you do that, you stand the best chance of doing your best writing.

You occupied my space. But because you were not in my present, when I looked into my future I saw . . . nothing. Isn't that sad? And stupid?

We live in a silent explosion, Everything is flying away from everything else... flying away... flying away...

Peace and harmony do not require perfection. Thank goodness for that—because life so often seems to be an itch here, a glitch there, a mess waiting to happen. Harmony is flexible. It bends with imperfection. So should you.

This was the start of a period that blurs as I try to recall it. Incidents seem to cascade and merge. Events become feelings, fellings become events. Head and heart are contrary historians.