You are... you're like a beating heart. A glowing lamp. I've never met anyone like you before.

In all experience, there is something to be learned. In deepest sorrow, wisdom is found. In the well of despair, hope rises.

He and I…we share a bond. Not love, exactly. It goes beyond that. He is mine as surely as sun follows moon across the sky. Mine before ever I knew he existed. Mine until death and beyond.

You know not, yet, the sort of love that strikes like a lightning bolt; that clutches hold of you by the heart, as irrevocably as death; that becomes the lodestar by which you steer the rest of your life. I would not wish such a love on anyone, man or woman, for it can make your life a paradise, or it can destroy you utterly.

Hope is such a tenuous quality. To feel it and then to be denied what one most longs for ... Better, surely, not to hope at all, than to open the heart to a hope that is impossible.

And as I watched him, I knew that in every dark night there was, somewhere, a small light burning that could never be quenched.

More like some small, fierce bird of prey, something with a sharp bite. An owl perhaps, that speaks only when the rest of the world sleeps. Jenny will do well enough.