Believe me, you have to have a certain confidence in your powers of descretion to let a dentist loose with a drill in your mouth less than an hour after you've...um...entertained his wife.

Know that you hold my heart, my hopes, in your hands.

Do you know how hard it is to say nothing? When every atom of you strains to do the opposite? I had practiced not saying anything the whole way from the airport, and it was still nearly killing me.

So this is it. You are scored on my heart, Clark. You were from the first day you walked in, with your ridiculous clothes and your bad jokes and your complete inability to ever hide a single thing you felt.

I let him know a hurt had been mended in a way that he couldn’t have known, and for that alone there would always be a piece of me indebted to him.

I hadn’t realized that music could unlock things in you, could transport you to somewhere even the composer hadn’t predicted. It left an imprint in the air around you, as if you carried its remnants with you when you went.

I thought, briefly, that I would never feel as intensely connected to the world, to another human being, as I did at that moment.