The Emotional Stakes A Memoirist Bets With

Ten Years, She's Dead, And I Still Find Myself Some Mornings Reaching For The Phone To Call Her. She Could No More Be Gone Than Gravity Or The Moon.

It Turned Out To Be Impossible For Me To 'run Away' In The Sense Other American Teenagers Did. Any Movement At All Was Taken For Progress In My Family.

There's A Space At The Bottom Of An Exhale, A Little Hitch Between Taking In And Letting Out That's A Perfect Zero You Can Go Into. There's A Rest Point Between The Heart Muscle's Close And Open - An Instant Of Keenest Living When You're Momentarily Dead. You Can Rest There.

Every Now And Then We Enter The Presence Of The Numinous And Deduce For An Instant How We're Formed, In What Detail The Force That Infuses Every Petal Might Specifically Run Through Us, Wishing Only To Lure Us Into Our Full Potential.

If You Live In The Dark A Long Time And The Sun Comes Out, You Do Not Cross Into It Whistling. There's An Initial Uprush Of Relief At First, Then-for Me, Anyway- A Profound Dislocation. My Old Assumptions About How The World Works Are Buried, Yet My New Ones Aren't Yet Operational.there's Been A Death Of Sorts, But Without A Few Days In Hell, No Resurrection Is Possible.