I'd heard August say more than once, "If you need something from somebody, always give that person a way to hand it to you." T. Ray needed a face-saving way to hand me over, and August was giving it to him.

Yes, here I am returning, the woman who bore herself to the bottom and back. Who wanted to swim like dolphins, leaping waves and diving. Who wanted only to belong to herself.

Until we look from the bottom up we have nothing.

As an adolescent, I went to charm school, where I learned to pour tea and relate to boys, which, as I recall, meant giving them the pickle jar to unscrew, whether it was too hard for me or not.

People can start out one way, and by the time life gets through with them they end up completely different.

Embodiment means we no longer say, I had this experience; we say, I am this experience.

I could even feel how perishable all my moments really were, how all my life they had come to me begging to be lived, to be cherished even.