When you think about it, giving up your real personality is a small price to pay for the richness of living happily ever after with an actual man!

This ability to exist in pieces is what some adults call resilience. And I suppose in some way it is a kind of resilience, a horrible resilience that makes adults believe children forget trauma.

Remember how you used to be able to feel your bed breathing and the walls spinning when you were a kid?

The radio was on and that was the first time I heard that song, the one I hate. Whenever I hear it all I can think of is that very day riding in the front seat with Lucy leaning against me and the smell of Juicy Fruit making me want to throw up. How can a song do that? Be like a net that catches a whole entire day, even a day whose guts you hate? You hear it and all of a sudden everything comes hanging back in front of you, all tangled up in that music.

The point of the daily diary exercise is not to record what you already know about what happened to you in the last 24 hours. Instead, it’s an invitation to the back of your mind to come forward and reveal to you the perishable images about the day you didn’t notice you noticed at all.

The thing I call ‘my mind’ seems to be kind of like a landlord that doesn’t really know its tenants.

I used to live a very social life and never spend much solitary time looking at birds or reading.