Everything in me feels fluttering and free, like I could take off from the ground at any second. Music, I think, he makes me feel like music.

But...books are so much more. Some of them are webs; you can feel your way along their threads, but just barely, into strange and dark corners. Some of them are balloons bobbing up through the sky: totally self-contained, and unreachable, but beautiful to watch. And some of them―the best ones―are doors.

If singing were a feeling it would be this, this light, this lifting, like laughing.

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 reach out and grab her wrist. It feels impossibly tiny in my hand, like this one time I found a baby bird near goose Point, and I picked it up and it died there, taking its final gasping fluttering breaths in my palm.

Through wind, and tempest, storm, and rain; The calm shall be buried inside of me; A warm stone, heavy and dry; The root, the source, a weapon against pain

Things change after you die, though, I guess because dying is the loneliest thing you can do.