Needing was so easy: it came naturally, like breathing. Being needed by someone else, though, that was the hard part. But as with giving help and accepting it, we had to do both to be made complete-like links overlapping to form a chain, or a lock finding the right key.

We can't expect everybody to be there for us, all at once. So it's a lucky thing that really, all you need is someone.

Your mother won a special reward," she told me, "because everyone had a head in her pictures. We all applauded.

But I'd long ago learned not to be picky in farewells. They weren't guaranteed or promised. You were lucky, more than blessed, if you got a good-bye at all.

He was the closest thing I'd ever had to something, or someone, that mattered. But in the end, close didn't count. You were either in, or you weren't.

She stroked my hair and told me I was beautiful, but I was old enough by then to know not to believe it anymore.

Now I felt like I was drifting, sucked down by an undertow, and too far out to swim back to the shore.