Whether or not you believe in Fate comes down to one thing: who do you blame when something goes wrong.

At 17, the smallest crises took on tremendous proportions; someone else's thoughts could take root in the loam of your own mind; having someone accept you was as vital as oxygen. Adults, light years away from this, rolled their eyes and smirked and said, 'This too shall pass' - as if adolescence was a disease like chicken pox, something everyone recalled as a milk nuisance, completely forgetting how painful it had been at the time.

I was starting to see that what looks like garbage from one angle might be art from another. Maybe it did take a crisis to get to know yourself; maybe you needed to get whacked hard by life before you understood what you wanted out of it.

He rises over me, a second sun, and fills me with light and heat.

You can't win. Either you have the baby and wear your pain on the outside, or you don't have the baby, and you keep that ache in you forever

Eric understands that the world is rarelythe way it is supposed to be. And he knows that, given the chance, we don't have to wait for someone to make messes of our lives. We do a good enough job, ourselves.

I think I have sort of gravitated toward issues that I don't know the answers to, because that's what's more interesting for me to write.