....love and desire enjoy a symbiotic relationship, meaning that one cannot exist without the other. Desire is an enemy to contentment; desire is illness, a feverish brain. Who can be considered healthy who wants? The very word want suggests a lack, an impoverishment, and that is what desire is: an impoverishment of the brain, a flaw, a mistake.

Love. I love you. I’ll always love you, my love. You are the love of my life.

And when we are with Alex, I might as well not be there. They speak in a language of whispers and giggles and secrets; their words are like a fairy-tale tangle of thorns, which place a wall between us.

As Steve draws me closer to the band, all I can see is a frenzied mass of seething, writhing people, like a many-headed sea snake, grinding, waving their arms, stamping their feet, jumping. No rules, just energy - so much energy, you could harness it; I bet you could power Portland for a decade. It is more than a wave. It's a tide, an ocean of bodies.

Things would get difficult again. But that was okay too. The bravery was in moving forward, no matter what.

It is a ruined-world, a nonsense-place.

Droplets, droplets: we are all identical drips and drops of people, hovering, waiting to be tipped, waiting for someone to show us the way, to pour us down a path.