If you've lived through it, you already know there are no words that will ever come close to describing it, and if you didn't - you will never understand.

People have to experience things that terrify them. If they don't, how will they ever come to appreciate safety?

From that point of view, I realized that my hole was not miles deep after all. My father, in fact, could stand on the bottom and it only reached up to his chest. Darkness, you know, is relative.

When you think you're right, you're most likely wrong.

And I remembered something else that makes us human: faith, the only weapon in our arsenal to battle doubt.

And in general, the residents of the town wondered why they all felt hollow just beneath the throat, the result of missing something they had never been able to name in the first place.

It was like trying to bail out an ocean of water with a teaspoon.