Some People Should Never Meet.

I Am Not Good At Noticing When I'm Happy, Except In Retrospect.

What I Warn You To Remember Is That I Am A Detective. Our Relationship With Truth Is Fundamental But Cracked, Refracting Confusingly Like Fragmented Glass. It Is The Core Of Our Careers, The Endgame Of Every Move We Make, And We Pursue It With Strategies Painstakingly Constructed Of Lies And Concealment And Every Variation On Deception.

Real Isn't What They Try To Tell You. Time Isn't. Grown-ups Hammer Down All These Markers, Bells, Schedules, Coffee-breaks, To Stake Down Time So You'll Start Believing It's Something Small And Mean, Something That Scrapes Flake After Flake Off Of Everything You Love Till There's Nothing Left; To Stake You Down So You Don't Lift Off And Fly Away, Somersaulting Through Whirlpools Of Months, Skimming Through Eddies Of Glittering Seconds, Pouring Handfuls Of Hours Over Your Upturned Face.

Now That's A Concept That's Always Fascinated Me: The Real World. Only A Very Specific Subset Of People Use The Term, Have You Noticed? To Me, It Seems Self-evident That Everyone Lives In The Real World - We All Breathe Real Oxygen, Eat Real Food, The Earth Under Our Feet Feels Equally Solid To All Of Us. But Clearly These People Have A Far More Tightly Circumscribed Definition Of Reality, One That I Find Deeply Mysterious, And An Almost Pathologically Intense Need To Bring Others Into Line With That Definition.

We Had No One Else To Learn This From- None Of Our Parents Were Shining Examples Of Relationship Success- So We Learned This From Each Other: When Someone You Love Needs You To, You Can Get A Hold Of Your Five-alarm Temper, Get A Hold Of The Shapeless Things That Scare You Senseless, Act Like An Adult Instead Of The Cro-magnon Teenager You Are, You Can Do A Million Things You Never Saw Coming.