It's crazy, right? To love someone who's hurt you? It's even crazier to think that someone who hurts you loves you.

I believe in love. I think it just hits you and pulls the rug out from underneath you and, like a baby, demands your attention every minute of the day.

People in the real world would kill for a happily ever after, and you're willing to just throw it away ?" I look away from her. "It's hardly a happily ever after when you wind up right at the beginning.

Each memory is like a paper flower stowed up a magician's sleeve: invisible one moment and then so substantial and florid the next I cannot imagine how it stayed hidden all this time. And like those paper flowers, once they've been let loose in the world, the memories are impossible to tuck away again.

The reason I am still sitting at Josef's kitchen table is the same reason traffic slows after a car wreck- you want to see the damage; you can't let yourself pass without that mental snapshot. We are drawn to horror even as we recoil from it.

We are all, I suppose, beholden to our parents - the question is, how much?

After all, how many of us had tried to forget something traumatic...only to find it printed on the back of our eyelids, tattooed on our tongues?