Six seconds in, six seconds out- no choice anymore. Don’t mess this up. If I mess up, even by a second, I have to start the breath cycle all over again. That’s the rule. The unbreakable rule.

Pam, my new therapist, who’s like some blissed-out, grown-up, yoga-hippie version of Rain, says that the physical body, the idea of the self, is kind of a scar: a brief puckering of time, a fleeting sewing together of energy and heart, which go beyond the physical form, on and on and on, forever.

For a second--a second that lasts infinite seconds--he turns his face away from the wind to meet my eye. He smiles, he smiles without worrying about the gap in his teeth, he smiles in a way that I know: he is free.

I wonder if that’s just how it feels to miss someone so bad – like being stabbed in the gut a little bit, each time you think of them.

My secret still sits, burning, in the bottom of my belly – that I love him. That I will always love him. And everything I want from him is now impossible: A normal life. A normal relationship. Wrapping my arms around him whenever I want to. Not having to worry at any moment he will evaporate.

(…) maybe the heart is an organ on constant ready, always waiting to try again, always open to the next best thing.

It’s not a real place, not a real thing. Mom made up the Gray Space, the place of anti-art, antifeeling, the cold dark place that felt like death. It was just her zany way of describing the place she went when she felt most depressed, when making music at all became impossible.It isn’t real.