I was once told by someone wise that writing is perilous as you cannot always guarantee your words will be read in the spirit in which they were written.

I held him close and said nothing, all the while telling him silently that he was loved. Oh, but he was loved.

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

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.

They began to tune up, and suddenly the auditorium was filled with a single sound - the most alive, three-dimensional thing I had ever heard. It made the hairs on my skin stand up, my breath catch in my throat....I felt the music like a physical thing; it didn't just sit in my ears, it flowed through me, around me, made my senses vibrate. It made my skin prickle and my palms dampen...It was the most beautiful thing I had ever heard.

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

The thing about being catapulted into a whole new life--or at least, shoved up so hard against someone else's life that you might as well have your face pressed against their window--is that it forces you to rethink your idea of who you are. Or how you might seem to other people.