We think that we are invincible because we are.

So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane.

I stand in this parking lot, realizing that I’ve never been this far from home, and here is this girl I love and cannot follow. I hope this is the hero’s errand, because not following her is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.

She smiled with all the delight of a kid on Christmas morning and said, "Y'all smoke to enjoy it. I smoke to die." - Alaska

And as paralyzing and upsetting as all the never agains were, the final leaving felt perfect. Pure. The most distilled possible form of liberation.

But it is a pipe." "No, it's not," I said. It's a drawing of a pipe. Get it? All representations of a thing are inherently abstract. It's very clever.

Before I got here, I thought for a long time that the way out of the labyrinth was to pretend that it did not exist, to build a small, self-sufficient world in the back corner of the endless maze and to pretend that I was not lost, but home.