if they were meant to be together they would find a way to do it.

Life passes by now like the scenery outside a car window. I breathe and eat and sleep as I always did, but there seems to be no great purpose in my life that requires active participation on my part...I do not know where I am going or when I will get there.

And believe it or not, she has a phone and everything. She stopped using smoking signals last year.

Part of me aches at the thought of her being so close yet so untouchable, but her story and mine are different now. It wasn't easy for me to accept this simple truth, because there was a time when our stories were the same, but that was six years and two lifetimes ago.

Say I'm a bird! Say it! Say it now!" "You're a bird." "Now say you're a bird too." "If you're a bird, I'm a bird.

As a girl, she had come to believe in the ideal man -- the prince or knight of her childhood stories. In the real world, however, men like that simply didn't exist.

I have always had an interest in how cultural rituals play into something as unpredictable as romance.