As we're standing there I realize we're almost exactly the same height. We must look like the dark and light side of an Oreo cookie, and I think how just as easily it could have been the other way around. She could be blocking my path; I could be trying to slip around her into the dark.

I love you. Remember. They cannot take it

It's so strange how life works: You want something and you wait and wait and feel like it's taking forever to come. Then it happens and it's over and all you want to do is curl back up in that moment before things changed.

All of you, wherever you are: in your spiny cities, or your one-bump towns. Find it, the hard stuff, the links of metal and chink, the fragments of stone filling your stomach. And pull, and pull, and pull. I will make a pact with you: I will do it if you will do it, always and forever. Take down the walls.

Every choice is limited. That's life.

Amazing how hope lives. Without air or water, with hardly anything at all to nurture it.

I know what the problem is, of course. The disorientation, the distraction, the difficulty focusing - all classic Phase One signs of deliria. But I don't care. If pneumonia felt this good I'd stand out in the snow in the winter with bare feet and no coat, or march into the hospital and kiss pneumonia patients