Summer explodes into Portland. In early June the heat was there but not the color--the green were still pale and tentative, the morning had a biting coolness--but by the last week of school everything is Technicolor and splash, outrageous blue skies and purple thunderstorms and ink-black night skies and red flowers as brights as spots of blood.

I feel a flash of grief so intense it almost makes me cry out: not for what I lost, but for the chances I missed.

I cry for everything I abandoned and because I, too, have been left behind -- by Alex, by my mom, by time that has cut through our worlds and separated us.

When you love someone, when you care for someone, you have to do it through the good and the bad. Not just when you're happy and it's easy.

I'm used to a feeling of doubleness, of thinking one thing and having to do another, a constant tug-of-war.

The priests and the scientists are right about one thing: At our heart, at our base, we are no better than animals.

Perhaps this was how the sparrows did it too; perhaps they were looking so hard at the peaks and tips of the new rooftops coated with dew, and the vast new horizon, that they only forgot that they did not know how to fly until they were already in midair.