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.

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.

But what he didn't understand was that this dreamland was preferable, walking through this life half-sleeping, everything at arm's length or farther away. I understood those mermaids. I didn't care if they sang to me. All I wanted was to block out all the human voices as they called me name again and again, pulling me upward into light, to drown.

After the group vet appointment--during which Lyle scratched the vet, the vet tech, and some poor woman minding her own business in the waiting room--we went back to Sabrina's and re-released the cats to their natural habitat.

Fall in love with someone who truly deserves your heart. Not with someone who plays with it.

A lot can change between planning something and actually doing it. But maybe all that really matters is that anything is different at all.

Like so many before them, they didn't care that my dad was only the messenger. They still wanted to shoot him.