I watched her and I watched the birds' shadows flit across her face, and I...wanted. I wanted more happy memories to hang up on the ceiling, so many happy memories with this girl that they would crowd the ceiling and flap out into the hall and burst out of the house.

It was the stop that happened when you made up your mind to confess, but your mouth betrayed you in the end.

Peeling off my skin / leaving just my eyes behind / You see inside my head / Still know that you are mine.

Everything mattered and nothing did, and I was tired of trying to find out how both of those things were true. I was an itch that I'd scratched so hard I was bleeding. I had set out to do the impossible, whatever the impossible might be, only to find out that it was living with myself. Suicide became an expiration date, the day after which I no longer had to try.

My most memorable adventure was investigating the chalk cliffs in Yorkshire. While clambering over kelp-covered boulders half-covered by the sea, I fell and smashed my tail bone on one of them.

Peppermint swirled into my nostrils, sharp as glass, then raspberry almost to sweet, like too-ripe fruit. Apple, crisp and pure. Nuts, buttery, warm, earthy

I could still smell her on my fur. It clung to me, a memory of another world. I was drunk with it, with the scent of her. I'd got too close. The smell of summer on her skin, the half-recalled cadence of her voice, the sensation of her fingers on my fur. Every bit of me sang with the memory of her closeness. Too close. I couldn't stay away.