I Have Lost My Phone Quotes

If I should have a daughter…“Instead of “Mom”, she’s gonna call me “Point B.” Because that way, she knows that no matter what happens, at least she can always find her way to me. And I’m going to paint the solar system on the back of her hands so that she has to learn the entire universe before she can say “Oh, I know that like the back of my hand.” She’s gonna learn that this life will hit you, hard, in the face, wait for you to get back up so it can kick you in the stomach. But getting the wind knocked out of you is the only way to remind your lungs how much they like the taste of air. There is hurt, here, that cannot be fixed by band-aids or poetry, so the first time she realizes that Wonder-woman isn’t coming, I’ll make sure she knows she doesn’t have to wear the cape all by herself. Because no matter how wide you stretch your fingers, your hands will always be too small to catch all the pain you want to heal. Believe me, I’ve tried. And “Baby,” I’ll tell her “don’t keep your nose up in the air like that, I know that trick, you’re just smelling for smoke so you can follow the trail back to a burning house so you can find the boy who lost everything in the fire to see if you can save him. Or else, find the boy who lit the fire in the first place to see if you can change him.” But I know that she will anyway, so instead I’ll always keep an extra supply of chocolate and rain boats nearby, ‘cause there is no heartbreak that chocolate can’t fix. Okay, there’s a few heartbreaks chocolate can’t fix. But that’s what the rain boots are for, because rain will wash away everything if you let it. I want her to see the world through the underside of a glass bottom boat, to look through a magnifying glass at the galaxies that exist on the pin point of a human mind. Because that’s how my mom taught me. That there’ll be days like this, “There’ll be days like this my momma said” when you open your hands to catch and wind up with only blisters and bruises. When you step out of the phone booth and try to fly and the very people you wanna save are the ones standing on your cape. When your boots will fill with rain and you’ll be up to your knees in disappointment and those are the very days you have all the more reason to say “thank you,” ‘cause there is nothing more beautiful than the way the ocean refuses to stop kissing the shoreline no matter how many times it’s sent away. You will put the “wind” in win some lose some, you will put the “star” in starting over and over, and no matter how many land mines erupt in a minute be sure your mind lands on the beauty of this funny place called life. And yes, on a scale from one to over-trusting I am pretty damn naive but I want her to know that this world is made out of sugar. It can crumble so easily but don’t be afraid to stick your tongue out and taste it. “Baby,” I’ll tell her “remember your mama is a worrier but your papa is a warrior and you are the girl with small hands and big eyes who never stops asking for more.” Remember that good things come in threes and so do bad things and always apologize when you’ve done something wrong but don’t you ever apologize for the way your eyes refuse to stop shining. Your voice is small but don’t ever stop singing and when they finally hand you heartbreak, slip hatred and war under your doorstep and hand you hand-outs on street corners of cynicism and defeat, you tell them that they really ought to meet your mother.

Simon I've been trying to call you, but it seems like your phone is turned off. I don't know where you are right now. I don't know if Clary's already told you what happened tonight. But I have to go to Magnus's and I'd really like you to be there. I'm scared for my brother. I never ask you for anything, Simon, but I'm asking you now. Please come. Isabelle. Simon let the letter fall from his hand. He was out of the apartment and on his way down the steps before it had even hit the floor.

It's not that you have lost touch with these people. You haven't. It's just that they have kept in such close touch with each other. When scrolling through your cell phone, you generally let their numbers be highlighted for a second, hovering, and then move along to people you have spoken to within the last month. It's not that you're a bad friend to these people. It's just that you're not a great one. They know the names of each other's coworkers and the blow-by-blow nature of each other's dramas; they go camping in the Berkshires together and have such sentences in their conversational arsenal as "you left your lip gloss in my bathroom." You have no such sentences. Your connection to your friends is half-baked and you are starting to forget their siblings' names, never mind their coworkers. But you're still in the play even if you're no longer a main character.

I would miss having Nic in my life. I would miss his funny phone messages and his humor, the stories, our talks, our walks, watching movies with him, dinners together, and the transcendent feeling between us that is love. I would miss all of it. I miss it now. And here it sinks in: I don't have it now. I have not had it whenever Nic has been on drugs. Nic is absent, only his shell remains. I have been afraid - terrified - to lose Nic, but I have lost him.

On May 26th, 2003, Aaron Ralston was hiking, a boulder fell on his right hand, he waited four days, he then amputated his own arm with a pocketknife. On New Year’s Eve, a woman was bungee jumping, the cord broke, she fell into a river and had to swim back to land in crocodile-infested waters with a broken collarbone. Claire Champlin was smashed in the face by a five-pound watermelon being propelled by a slingshot. Mathew Brobst was hit by a javelin. David Striegl was actually punched in the mouth by a kangaroo. The most amazing part of these stories is when asked about the experience they all smiled, shrugged and said “I guess things could’ve been worse.” So go ahead, tell me you’re having a bad day. Tell me about the traffic. Tell me about your boss. Tell me about the job you’ve been trying to quit for the past four years. Tell me the morning is just a townhouse burning to the ground and the snooze button is a fire extinguisher. Tell me the alarm clock stole the keys to your smile, drove it into 7 am and the crash totaled your happiness. Tell me. Tell me how blessed are we to have tragedy so small it can fit on the tips of our tongues. When Evan lost his legs he was speechless. When my cousin was assaulted she didn’t speak for 48 hours. When my uncle was murdered, we had to send out a search party to find my father’s voice. Most people have no idea that tragedy and silence often have the exact same address. When your day is a museum of disappointments, hanging from events that were outside of your control, when you feel like your guardian angel put in his two weeks notice two months ago and just decided not to tell you, when it seems like God is just a babysitter that’s always on the phone, when you get punched in the esophagus by a fistful of life. Remember, every year two million people die of dehydration. So it doesn’t matter if the glass is half full or half empty. There’s water in the cup. Drink it and stop complaining. Muscle is created by lifting things that are designed to weigh us down. When your shoulders are heavy stand up straight and call it exercise. Life is a gym membership with a really complicated cancellation policy. Remember, you will survive, things could be worse, and we are never given anything we can’t handle. When the whole world crumbles, you have to build a new one out of all the pieces that are still here. Remember, you are still here. The human heart beats approximately 4,000 times per hour and each pulse, each throb, each palpitation is a trophy, engraved with the words “You are still alive.” You are still alive. So act like it.

There are moments in history that seem like a mist, as if what really happens matters less that what should have happened. The mists lift suddenly and there we are, my good parents and their good children, their grateful children who phone for no reason but to talk, say their good-nights with a kiss, and look forward to home on the holidays. I see how, in a family like mine, love doesn't have to be earned and it can't be lost. Just for a moment I see us that way; I see us all. Restored and repaired. Reunited. Refulgent.

Diesel was about to place the cockroach on the casket, and my purse rocked out with “Thriller” again. “Excuse me,” I said. And I answered my phone. “I’m beginning to appreciate Hatchet,” Wulf said to Diesel. Diesel smiled. “She has her moments. And she makes cupcakes.” I disconnected and stuffed my phone into my pocket. “Well?” Diesel asked. “It was Glo. Her broom ran away again.” “I would appreciate it if we could get on with this without more interruption,” Wulf said in his eerily quiet voice, his eyes riveted on mine. “Lighten up,” I said to Wulf. “Glo lost her broom again. This is a big deal for her. And what have we got here anyway…a dead guy and a Stone. Do you think they can wait for three minutes longer?” Diesel gave a bark of laughter, and Wulf looked like her was trying hard not to sigh. - Diesel, Lizzy, and Wulf, page 306-307.

If something happened to Suzanne I don’t think I would want to go through with finding somebody else either. I’d feel quite lost without her. It would be like separating Siamese twins, as we’ve been through everything together. Which can also be handy, as my memory isn’t what it used to be, so I use hers as my back-up memory drive. Meeting someone new would be like getting a new phone. You have to start again, input all of your information into them while trying to get to know their functions.

Sì, maybe I should consult Viktor. Niccolo pulled his phone from his pocket. His fingers jabbed at the miniature text pad with frustration: H asked me 2 break 1 of my rules, then I should sleep w/ her. Yes? Niccolo hit send. Viktor responded immediately: U mean sexting. right? Niccolo: Sexting? Viktor: Sex+texting. Niccolo: Idiot. real sex. Viktor: Dumbass! Then u lose chance 4 freedom. Niccolo: Have lost it already. I think. Viktor: K, then tell her who U R instead, ass.

By just living one’s life, sadness accumulates here and there, be it in the sheets hung out in the sun to dry, the toothbrushes in the bathroom, and the history logs of the mobile phone…In the last several years, I have forged ahead without any regard, just to touch what I cannot reach. Without understanding the sources from which this menacing thought surged forth from, I continued working. When I at last noticed, my heart had already become hard from the gradual loss of its youthful vitality. And on certain morning, when I at last came to an earnest realization that I had lost everything that was beautiful, I knew I was at my limits and quit the company.

During the night, I have one of those dreams that aren’t really dreams at all, just stuff about Laura fucking Ray, and Marco fucking Charlie, and I’m pleased to wake up in the middle of the night, because it means stopping the dream. But the pleasure only lasts a few seconds and then everything sinks in: that somewhere Laura really is fucking Ray (maybe not exactly now, because it’s 3:56 a.m., although with his stamina – his inability to climax, ha ha – you never know), and I’m here, in this stupid little flat, on my own, and I’m thirty-five years old, and I own a tiny failing business, and my friends don’t seem to be friends at all but people whose phone numbers I haven’t lost And if I went back to sleep and slept for forty years and woke up without any teeth to the sound of Melody Radio in an old people’s home, I wouldn’t worry that much, because the worst of life, i.e. the rest of it, would be over. And I wouldn’t even have had to kill myself.

I’m still lost in thought when my phone rings. I check the screen, and for a second I think it’s Dean calling, until I do a double take and realize it’s an S, not a D. Huh. My ex-boyfriend and my one-night-stand literally have the same name with one letter replaced. I wonder if that means something… Sean’s calling you, you idiot. Yeah, that’s probably the more pressing issue at the moment. My chest fills with anxiety. I shouldn’t pick up. I really, really shouldn’t pick up. I pick up.

As for human contact, I'd lost all appetite for it. Mankind has, as you may have noticed, become very inventive about devising new ways for people to avoid talking to each other and I'd been taking full advantage of the most recent ones. I would always send a text message rather than speak to someone on the phone. Rather than meeting with any of my friends, I would post cheerful, ironically worded status updates on Facebook, to show them all what a busy life I was leading. And presumably people had been enjoying them, because I'd got more than seventy friends on Facebook now, most of them complete strangers. But actual, face-to-face, let's-meet-for-a-coffee-and-catch-up sort of contact? I seemed to have forgotten what that was all about.

When [an abusive man] tells me that he became abusive because he lost control of himself, I ask him why he didn’t do something even worse. For example, I might say, “You called her a fucking whore, you grabbed the phone out of her hand and whipped it across the room, and then you gave her a shove and she fell down. There she was at your feet where it would have been easy to kick her in the head. Now, you have just finished telling me that you were ‘totally out of control’ at that time, but you didn’t kick her. What stopped you?” And the client can always give me a reason. Here are some common explanations: “I wouldn’t want to cause her a serious injury.” “I realized one of the children was watching.” “I was afraid someone would call the police.” “I could kill her if I did that.” “The fight was getting loud, and I was afraid the neighbors would hear.” And the most frequent response of all: “Jesus, I wouldn’t do that. I would never do something like that to her.” The response that I almost never heard – I remember hearing it twice in the fifteen years – was: “I don’t know.” These ready answers strip the cover off of my clients’ loss of control excuse.

What is going on with you, Rev?” He rubs his eyes. “I don’t know. I’m just tired.” I think of how he sat in the hospital with me, saying nothing. His silence was more supportive than anything he could have said. I don’t know how to do that in return. Maybe I can offer something else, though. I pull out my phone and do a quick search, then turn it around and slide it across the bed. He doesn’t reach for it. “Did she send more?” “No. It’s a poem I had to read for English. Read it.” He looks up, and the expression on his face is exactly the one I’d wear if he suddenly said, Hey bro, read this poem. “What?” “Just read it. I think you’ll like it.

She struggled to find words, and then all the anger she had been damming up for the last few minutes broke out. It made no difference that none of what had happened was his fault. Nor did the fact that he’d saved her, or what he had sacrificed to do it. He was a Carnevare. He was one of them. And he was preventing her from going to her sister’s aid when Zoe needed her. “The girl that Cesare killed … ,” she snapped, “her name was Lilia. She … she loved my sister. Do you understand that? Zoe has just lost the person who probably meant more to her than anything else. And Lilia sacrificed herself for me. How can you think that—” “I’d have done the same thing,” he interrupted her calmly. “I’d have died for you up on that mountain.” That took her breath away. For a moment it deprived her not only of her self-control, but of the ability to utter another syllable. After endless seconds, she stammered, “That—that’s nonsense.” “It’s the truth.” He turned his head and looked at her. “I’m in love with you, Rosa.” She hesitated, fighting for composure. “Oh, hell,” she whispered. He smiled sadly. Then neither of them said anything, until finally she took his cell phone and called Zoe.

Next question.” He swipes the screen of his phone, but he’s not looking at it; he’s staring at me. Trying to intimidate me. Trying to see who’ll blink first. “Did you leave DC because (A) you couldn’t find any hotties to make out with? Or (B) your East Coast boyfriend is an ankle buster and you’d heard about legendary West Coast D, so you had to find out for yourself if the rumors were true?” he says with a smirk. “Idiot,” Grace mumbles, shaking her head. I may not understand some of his phrasing, but I get the gist. I feel myself blushing. But I manage to recover quickly and get a jab in. “Why are you so interested in my love life?” “I’m not. Why are you evading the question? You do that a lot, by the way.” “Do what?” “Evade questions.” “What business is that of yours?” I say, secretly irritated that he’s figured me out... Porter scoffs. “Seeing how this is your first day on the job, and may very well be your last, considering the turnover rate for this position? And seeing how I have seniority over you? I’d say, yeah, it’s pretty much my business.” “Are you threatening me?” I ask. He clicks off his phone and raises a brow. “Huh?” “That sounded like a threat,” I say. “Whoa, you need to chill. That was not . . .” He can’t even say it. He’s flustered now, tucking his hair behind his ear. “Grace . . .” Grace holds up a hand. “Leave me out of this mess. I have no idea what I’m even witnessing here. Both of you have lost the plot.

you were last seen walking through a field of pianos. no. a museum of mouths. in the kitchen of a bustling restaurant, cracking eggs and releasing doves. no. eating glow worms and waltzing past my bedroom. last seen riding the subway, literally, straddling its metal back, clutching electrical cables as reins. you were wearing a dress made out of envelopes and stamps, this was how you travelled. i was the mannequin in the storefront window you could have sworn moved. the library card in the book you were reading until that dog trotted up and licked your face. the cookie with two fortunes. the one jamming herself through the paper shredder, afraid to talk to you. the beggar, hat outstretched bumming for more minutes. the phone number on the bathroom stall with no agenda other than a good time. the good time is a picnic on water, or a movie theatre that only plays your childhood home videos and no one hushes when you talk through them. when they play my videos i throw milk duds at the screen during the scenes i watch myself letting you go – lost to the other side of an elevator – your face switching to someone else’s with the swish of a geisha’s fan. my father could have been a travelling salesman. i could have been born on any doorstep. there are 2,469,501 cities in this world, and a lot of doorsteps. meet me on the boardwalk. i’ll be sure to wear my eyes. do not forget your face. i could never.

There are moments when history and memory seem like a mist, as if what really happened matters less than what should have happened. The mist lifts and suddenly there we are, my good parents and their good children, their grateful children who phone for no reason but to talk, say their good-nights with a kiss, and look forward to home on the holidays. I see how, in a family like mine, love doesn’t have to be earned and it can’t be lost.

So many books I keep meaning to read. I move the titles from one to-do list to another. I don’t bother listing Proust anymore. I’ve read the opening pages about the madeleine cookie soaked in linden flower tea so many times, I’ve come to think of In Search of Lost Time as a short lyric. I get the picture, if not the story. I have time for vignettes, but not for narrative arcs. I start a novel, but keep breaking off to check my iPhone. I-Phone indeed—the busyness of me myself and I.

In that uncertain period when Paul and I had been separated for several months but were not yet sure we wanted to get divorced, we sat down together to scan a set of no-fault, do-it-yourself divorce documents we’d ordered over the phone, as if holding them in our hands would help us decide what to do. As we paged through the documents, we came across a question that asked the name we’d each have after the divorce. The line beneath the question was perfectly blank. On it, to my amazement, we could write anything. Be anyone.

There’s also the small detail that . . . I haven’t slept in twenty-four hours. Not a blink. And if past is prologue, there are going to be a lot of sleepless nights in my future. I’m a high school senior—I have exams to study for, projects to complete, extracurricular activities to activitize, lifelong memories to make—and now I have a business to run. Who the fuck has time for sleep? I jack up the volume on my phone and scoop a tablespoon of instant coffee grounds into my mouth—washing the bitter, spiky granules down with a gulp of black, cold coffee. We don’t serve instant for the coffee shop. Instant coffee is disgusting. But it serves a purpose. It’s effective—efficient. I love caffeine. Love it. The high, the rush, the feeling that I’m Wonder Woman’s long-lost cousin and there ain’t shit I can’t do. I would mainline it, if that were actually a thing. I would probably become a meth-head if it weren’t for the rotting-teeth, ruined-life, most-likely-dying-by-overdose elements of it all. I’m a high school senior, not an asshole.

[From Sid Vicious's letter to Nancy Spungen's mother Deborah] P.S. Thank you, Debbie, for understanding that I have to die. Everyone else just thinks that I'm being weak. All I can say is that they never loved anyone as passionately as I love Nancy. I always felt unworthy to be loved by someone so beautiful as her. Everything we did was beautiful. At the climax of our lovemaking, I just used to break down and cry. It was so beautiful it was almost unbearable. It makes me mad when people say you must have really loved her.' So they think that I don't still love her? At least when I die, we will be together again. I feel like a lost child, so alone. The nights are the worst. I used to hold Nancy close to me all night so that she wouldn't have nightmares and I just can't sleep without my my beautiful baby in my arms. So warm and gentle and vulnerable. No one should expect me to live without her. She was a part of me. My heart. Debbie, please come and see me. You are the only person who knows what I am going through. If you don’t want to, could you please phone me again, and write. I love you. I was staggered by Sid's letter. The depth of his emotion, his sensitivity and intelligence were far greater than I could have imagined. Here he was, her accused murderer, and he was reaching out to me, professing his love for me. His anguish was my anguish. He was feeling my loss, my pain - so much so that he was evidently contemplating suicide. He felt that I would understand that. Why had he said that? I fought my sympathetic reaction to his letter. I could not respond to it, could not be drawn into his life. He had told the police he had murdered my daughter. Maybe he had loved her. Maybe she had loved him. I couldn't become involved with him. I was in too much pain. I couldn't share his pain. I hadn't enough strength. I began to stuff the letter back in its envelope when I came upon a separate sheet of paper. I unfolded it. It was the poem he'd written about Nancy. NANCY You were my little baby girl And I shared all your fears. Such joy to hold you in my arms And kiss away your tears. But now you’re gone there’s only pain And nothing I can do. And I don’t want to live this life If I can’t live for you. To my beautiful baby girl. Our love will never die. I felt my throat tighten. My eyes burned, and I began to weep on the inside. I was so confused. Here, in a few verses, were the last twenty years of my life. I could have written that poem. The feelings, the pain, were mine. But I hadn't written it. Sid Vicious had written it, the punk monster, the man who had told the police he was 'a dog, a dirty dog.' The man I feared. The man I should have hated, but somehow couldn't.

When I was a kid, summers were the most glorious time of life. Because my parents believed in hands-off, free-range parenting, I’d usually be out the door before ten and wouldn’t return until dinner. There were no cell phones to keep track of me and whenever my mom called a neighbor to ask where I was, the neighbor was often just as clueless as to her own child’s whereabouts. In fact, there was only one rule as far as I could tell: I had to be home at half past five, since my parents liked to eat dinner as a family. I can’t remember exactly how I used to spend those days. I have recollections in snapshot form: building forts or playing king of the hill on the high part of the jungle gym or chasing after a soccer ball while attempting to score. I remember playing in the woods, too. Back then, our home was surrounded by undeveloped land, and my friends and I would have dirt-clod wars or play capture the flag; when we got BB guns, we could spend hours shooting cans and occasionally shooting at each other. I spent hours exploring on my bicycle, and whole weeks would pass where I’d wake every morning with nothing scheduled at all. Of course, there were kids in the neighborhood who didn’t lead that sort of carefree existence. They would head off to camp or participate in summer leagues for various sports, but back then, kids like that were the minority. These days, kids are scheduled from morning to night because parents have demanded it, and London has been no exception. But how did it happen? And why? What changed the outlook of parents in my generation? Peer pressure? Living vicariously through a child’s success? Résumé building for college? Or was it simply fear that if their kids were allowed to discover the world on their own, nothing good would come of it? I don’t know. I am, however, of the opinion that something has been lost in the process: the simple joy of waking in the morning and having nothing whatsoever to do.

Dell pulled out his cell phone, speed-dialed a number, and put the phone on speaker. A woman answered with a professionally irritated tone: “What do you need now?” “Jade,” Dell said. “Nope, it’s the Easter Bunny. And your keys are on your desk.” Dell shook his head. “Now darlin’, I don’t always call you just because I’ve lost my keys.” “I’m sorry, you’re right. You wallet’s on your desk, too. As for your little black book, you’re on your own with that one, Dr. Flirt. I’m at lunch.” Dell sighed. “What did we say about you and the whole power-play thing?” “That it’s good for your ego to have at least one woman in your life that you can’t flash a smile at and have them drop their panties?” Dell grinned. “I really like it when you say ‘panties.’ And for the record, I knew where my keys and wallet were.” “No you didn’t.” “Okay, I didn’t, but that’s not why I’m calling. Can you bring burgers and fries for me and Brady? Oh, and Adam, too, or he’ll bitch like a little girl.” “You mean ‘Jade, will you pretty please bring us burgers and fries?’” “Yes,” Dell said, nodding. “That. And Cokes.” He looked at Brady, who nodded. “And don’t forget the ketchup.” “You forgot the nice words.” “Oh, I’m sorry,” Dell said. “You look fantastic today, I especially love the attitude and sarcasm you’re wearing.” Jade’s voice went saccharine sweet. “So some low-fat chicken salads, no dressing, and ice water to go, then?” “Fine,” Dell said, and sighed. “Can we please have burgers and fries?" “You forgot the ‘Thank you, Goddess Jade,’ but we’ll work on that. Later, boss.

cannot comprehend that if I call her phone, it will just ring and ring—that there is no longer anyone on the other end who will say, “Katy, honey. Just a second. My hands are wet.” I do not imagine ever coming to terms with the loss of her body—her warm, welcoming body. The place I always felt at home. My mother, you see, is the great love of my life. She is the great love of my life, and I have lost her.

from her purse. “We have to follow that car!” “But not too close,” Nancy replied. “We’d make them suspicious.” The girls waited three minutes before backing out into the main highway and then turning into the adjacent road. Though the automobile ahead had disappeared, tire prints were plainly visible. The road twisted through a stretch of wood-land. When finally the tire prints turned off into a heavily wooded narrow lane, Nancy was sure they were not far from the cabin. She parked among some trees and they went forward on foot. “There it is!” whispered Nancy, recognizing the chimney. “Bess, I want you to take my car, drive to River Heights, and look up the name of the owner of the car we just saw. Here’s the license number. “After you’ve been to the Motor Vehicle Bureau, please phone Mrs. Putney’s house. If she answers, we’ll know it wasn’t she we saw in the car. Then get hold of Dad or Ned, and bring one of them here as fast as you can. We may need help. Got it straight?” “I—I—g-guess so,” Bess answered. “Hurry back! No telling what may happen while you’re away.” The two watched as Nancy’s car rounded a bend and was lost to view. Then Nancy and George walked swiftly through the woods toward the cabin. Approaching the building, Nancy and George were amazed to find that no car was parked on the road in front. “How do you figure it?” George whispered as the girls crouched behind bushes. “We certainly saw tire marks leading into this road!” “Yes, but the car that passed may have gone on without stopping. Possibly the driver saw us and changed her plans. Wait here, and watch the cabin while I check the tire marks out at the

They are taking away all the nice things there because they are impractical, as if that were reason enough – the red phone-boxes, the pound note, those open London buses that you can leap on and off. There is almost no experience in life that makes you look and feel more suave than jumping on or off a moving London bus. But they aren’t practical. They require two men (one to drive and one to stop thugs from kicking the crap out of the Pakistani gentleman at the back) and that is uneconomical, so they have to go. And before long there will be no more milk in bottles delivered to the doorstep or sleepy rural pubs and the countryside will be mostly shopping centres and theme parks. Forgive me. I don’t mean to get upset. But you are taking my world away from me, piece by little piece, and sometimes it just pisses me off. Sorry.

There is a weird passivity that accompanies gentrification. I find that in my own building, the “old” tenants who pay lower rents are much more willing to organize for services, to object when there are rodents or no lights in the hallways. We put up signs in the lobby asking the new neighbors to phone the landlord and complain about mice, but the gentrified tenants are almost completely unwilling to make demands for basics. They do not have a culture of protest, even if they are paying $2,800 a month for a tenement walk-up apartment with no closets. It's like a hypnotic identification with authority. Or maybe they think they are only passing through. Or maybe they think they're slumming. But they do not want to ask authority to be accountable. It's not only the city that has changed, but the way its inhabitants conceptualize themselves.

World, turn all you want to, faster even. I've come to like the way the breeze feels as it rips me limb from limb. and I'm running the city water now in a sink safe from harm, and across the surface of most states there's a phone ringing and a somebody's lost a somebody, and a somebody's come home, and I'm unmoved in the kitchen pulling wings out of my teeth, praying for loads more wishes and a body out there waiting for this somebody in the kitchen waiting to be done stung. You mis everyone. Even the people you read about today you didn't know, their faces on the brain as if on paper. Maybe you don't even say it for yourself, maybe you move your mouth like everyone moves their mouth. Maybe your mouth is the same mouth as everyone's, all trying to say the same thing. You come home on the train and you have bought gifts and tried to be decent.

Close your eyes and stare into the dark. My father's advice when I couldn't sleep as a little girl. He wouldn't want me to do that now but I've set my mind to the task regardless. I'm staring beyond my closed eyelids. Though I lie still on the ground, I feel perched at the highest point I could possibly be; clutching at a star in the night sky with my legs dangling above cold black nothingness. I take one last look at my fingers wrapped around the light and let go. Down I go, falling, then floating, and, falling again, I wait for the land of my life. I know now, as I knew as that little girl fighting sleep, that behind her gauzed screen of shut-eye, lies colour. It taunts me, dares me to open my eyes and lose sleep. Flashes of red and amber, yellow and white speckle my darkness. I refuse to open them. I rebel and I squeeze my eyelids together tighter to block out the grains of light, mere distractions that keep us awake but a sign that there's life beyond. But there's no life in me. None that I can feel, from where I lie at the bottom of the staircase. My heart beats quicker now, the lone fighter left standing in the ring, a red boxing glove pumping victoriously into the air, refusing to give up. It's the only part of me that cares, the only part that ever cared. It fights to pump the blood around to heal, to replace what I'm losing. But it's all leaving my body as quickly as it's sent; forming a deep black ocean of its own around me where I've fallen. Rushing, rushing, rushing. We are always rushing. Never have enough time here, always trying to make our way there. Need to have left here five minutes ago, need to be there now. The phone rings again and I acknowledge the irony. I could have taken my time and answered it now. Now, not then. I could have taken all the time in the world on each of those steps. But we're always rushing. All, but my heart. That slows now. I don't mind so much. I place my hand on my belly. If my child is gone, and I suspect this is so, I'll join it there. There.....where? Wherever. It; a heartless word. He or she so young; who it was to become, still a question. But there, I will mother it. There, not here. I'll tell it; I'm sorry, sweetheart, I'm sorry I ruined your chances - our chances of a life together.But close your eyes and stare into the darkness now, like Mummy is doing, and we'll find our way together. There's a noise in the room and I feel a presence. 'Oh God, Joyce, oh God. Can you hear me, love? Oh God. Oh God, please no, Hold on love, I'm here. Dad is here.' I don't want to hold on and I feel like telling him so. I hear myself groan, an animal-like whimper and it shocks me, scares me. I have a plan, I want to tell him. I want to go, only then can I be with my baby. Then, not now. He's stopped me from falling but I haven't landed yet. Instead he helps me balance on nothing, hover while I'm forced to make the decision. I want to keep falling but he's calling the ambulance and he's gripping my hand with such ferocity it's as though I'm all he has. He's brushing the hair from my forehead and weeping loudly. I've never heard him weep. Not even when Mum died. He clings to my hand with all of his strength I never knew his old body had and I remember that I am all he has and that he, once again just like before, is my whole world. The blood continues to rush through me. Rushing, rushing, rushing. We are always rushing. Maybe I'm rushing again. Maybe it's not my time to go. I feel the rough skin of old hands squeezing mine, and their intensity and their familiarity force me to open my eyes. Lights fills them and I glimpse his face, a look I never want to see again. He clings to his baby. I know I lost mind; I can't let him lose his. In making my decision I already begin to grieve. I've landed now, the land of my life. And still my heart pumps on. Even when broken it still works.

You have a better option?” He didn’t. Neither did Sage. I borrowed Larry Steczynski’s cell phone to call Rayna. Personally, I never answer the phone if I won’t recognize the number. Rayna doesn’t feel the same way; she sees an unknown caller as a doorway to a possible romance. “Hello?” she answered seductively. “Hey, it’s me.” “Clea! Are you okay? I’ve been phone-stalking you for days. What happened? Where have you been?” “Sorry, I lost my cell. Everything’s okay.” Wow-that was easily the biggest lie I’d ever told anyone in my life. “How okay?” she asked playfully. “Did you meet someone amazing at Carnival and get swept off your feet?” I loved that those were the only two options for Rayna: Either something had gone horribly wrong, or I’d gotten wrapped up in a wild, whirlwind romance. I glanced at Sage. “I did meet someone…” “I knew it! I want to know everything.” “It’s kind of a long story.” “I’ve got nothing but time. Details!

I often think of the power of partial reinforcement, of how a diet of rare and random rewards can make a behavior difficult to extinguish. I don’t currently have to deal with toddlers who throw tantrums and I’ve never been tempted by slot machines. But I often find myself lost online, staring at my phone, numbly clicking on links, watching videos, doing the drag-down-to-refresh gesture in the hopes of seeing something that makes me feel good, and when I do all this, I am reminded of a rat in the behaviorist’s cage.

And you’re sitting here, waiting on him, looking like a lost puppy.” I shrugged. “It was a good month. I’m hoping for more five-cups-of-coffee moments.” “Five-cups-of-coffee moments?” “You know. That serious high you get after you’ve had five cups of coffee.” “You have to keep feeding love what it needs to keep it feeling like love. Drink a lot of coffee every day, and you’ll need to drink more coffee to get the same effect.” “Caffeine and love. Both are drugs. You become dependent. It starts to own you.” “Your relationship with Chicken and Waffles sounds as miserable as my marriage.” “I’m not hooked. We’re just ships docked at the same port for now, that’s all.” “You’re restless. Aggravated. Your expression says you’re in pain and ready to jump.” I frowned at my phone. “Hurts when he doesn’t call or text me back.” “The guy you’re chasing . . . is Chicken and Waffles the type of man you’d want your son to be?” “I’m not chasing him. I’m not chasing any man.” “Play the game. What you have described to me is an abusive relationship.

And sometimes I get carried away, that's all. If you weren't so...judgemental all the time-" "Am I? I don't think I am . I try not to be. I just don't..." She stopped herself speaking, shook her head. "I know you've been through a lot, in the last few years, and I've tried to understand that, really I have, with your mum and all, but..." "Go on," he said. "I just don't think you're the person I used to know. You're not my friend anymore. That's all." He could think of nothing to say to this, so they stood in silence, until Emma put her hand out, took two fingers of his hand, squeezed them in her palm. "Maybe...maybe this is it, then," she said. "Maybe it's just over." "Over? What's over?" "Us. You and me. Friendship. There are things I needed to talk to you about, Dex. About Ian and me. If you're my friend I should be able to talk to you but I can't, and if I can't talk to you, well, what is the point of you? Of us?" "'What's the point?'" "You said yourself, people change, no use getting sentimental about it. Move on, find someone else." "Yeah, but I didn't mean us..." "Why not?" "Because we're....us. We're Dex and Em. Aren't we?" Emma shrugged. "Maybe we've grown out of each other." He said nothing for a moment, then spoke. "So, do you think I've grown out of you, or you've grown out of me?" She wiped her nose with the back of her hand. "I think you think I'm....dreary. I think you think I cramp your style. I think you've lost interest in me." "Em I do not think you're dreary." "And neither do I! Neither do I! I think I'm fucking marvellous if you only knew it, and I think you used to think so too! But if you don't or if you're going to just take it for granted, then that's fine. I'm just not prepared to be treated like this anymore." "Treated like what?" She sighed, and it was a moment before she spoke. "Like you always want to be somewhere else, with someone else." He would have denied this, but the Cigarette Girl was waiting in the restaurant at that very moment, the number of his mobile phone tucked into her garter. Later he would wonder if there was something else he might have said to save the situation, a joke perhaps. But nothing occurred to him and Emma let go of his hand.

It was Day Three, Freshman Year, and I was a little bit lost in the school library,looking for a bathroom that wasn't full of blindingly shiny sophomores checking their lip gloss. Day Three.Already pretty clear on the fact that I would be using secondary bathrooms for at least the next three years,until being a senior could pass for confidence.For the moment, I knew no one,and was too shy to talk to anyone. So that first sight of Edward: pale hair that looked like he'd just run his hands through it, paint-smeared white shirt,a half smile that was half wicked,and I was hooked. Since, "Hi,I'm Ella.You look like someone I'd like to spend the rest of my life with," would have been totally insane, I opted for sitting quietly and staring.Until the bell rang and I had to rush to French class,completely forgetting to pee. Edward Willing.Once I knew his name, the rest was easy.After all,we're living in the age of information. Wikipedia, iPhones, 4G ntworks, social networking that you can do from a thousand miles away.The upshot being that at any given time over the next two years, I could sit twenty feet from him in the library, not saying a word, and learn a lot about him.ENough, anyway, for me to become completely convinced that the Love at First Sight hadn't been a fluke. It's pretty simple.Edward matched four and a half of my If My Prince Does, In Fact, Come Someday,It Would Be Great If He Could Meet These Five Criteria. 1. Interested in art. For me, it's charcoal. For Edward, oil paint and bronze. That's almost enough right there. Nice lips + artist= Ella's prince. 2. Not afraid of love. He wrote, "Love is one of two things worth dying for.I have yet to decide on the second." 3.Or of telling the truth. "How can I believe that other people say if I lie to them?" 4.Hot. Why not?I can dream. 5.Daring. Mountain climbing, cliff dying, defying the parents. Him, not me. I'm terrified of an embarrassing number of things, including heights, convertibles, moths, and those comedians everyone loves who stand onstage and yell insults at the audience. 5, subsection a. Daring enough to take a chance on me.Of course, in the end, that No. 5a is the biggie. And the problem. No matter how muuch I worshipped him,no matter how good a pair we might have been,it was never, ever going to happen. To be fair to Edward,it's not like he was given an opportunity to get to know me. I'm not stupid.I know there are a few basic truths when it comes to boys and me. Truth: You have to talk to a boy-really talk,if you want him to see past the fact that you're not beautiful. Truth: I'm not beautiful. Or much of a conversationalist. Truth: I'm not entirely sure that the stuff behind the not-beautiful is going to be all that alluring, either. And one written-in-stone, heartbreaking truth about this guy. Truth:Edward Willing died in 1916.

Nick's number waited impatiently on the screen, tapping its foot. I could press the red button to cancel the call. Without pressing anything, I set the phone down on my bedside table, crossed my arms,and glared at it. Good:Nick wouldn't think I was chasing him. Bad:Nick would die alone in his house from complications related to his stupendous wipeout.The guilt of knowing I could have saved his life if not for my outsized ego would be too much for me to bear.I would retreat from public life.I would join a nearby convent and knit potholders from strands of my own hair.No,I would crochet Christmas ornaments in the shape of delicate snowflakes.Red snowflakes! They would be sold in the souvenir shops around town.I would support a whole orphanage from the proceeds of snowflakes I crocheted from my hair.All the townspeople of Snowfall would tell tourists the story of Crazy Sister Hayden and the tragedy of her lost love. Or I could call Nick.Jesus! I snatched up the phone and pressed the green button. His phone switched straight to voice mail.Great,I hadn't found out whether he was dying,and if he recovered later,he would see my number on his phone and roll his eyes. Damage control: Beeeeep! "Hey,Nick,it's Hayden.Just,ah, wanted to know how a crash like that feels." Wait,I was trying to get him to call me back,right?He would not return my call after a message like that. "Actually just wondering whether you're ready to make out again and then have another argument." He might not return that call,either. "Actually,I remembered your mother isn't home,and I wanted to make sure you're okay.Please give me a call back." Pressed red button.Set phone on nightstand.Folded arms.Glared at phone. Picked it up. "Freaking stupid young love!" I hollered,slamming it into the pillows on my bed. Doofus jumped up, startled. Ah-ha.

Her hand shot out, gripped his arm. "M.J. and Bailey?" "Your friends are fine." He felt her grip go limp. "They've had an eventful holiday weekend, all of which could have been avoided if they'd contacted and cooperated with the police. And it's cooperation I'll have from you now, one way or the other." She tossed her hair back. "Where are they? What did you do,toss them in a cell? My lawyer will have them out and your butt in a sling before you can finish reciting the Miranda." She started toward the phone, saw it wasn't on the Queen Anne table. "No,they're not in a cell." It goaded him, the way she snapped into gear, ready to buck the rules. "I imagine they're planning your funeral right about now.

For all these years I kept my mouth closed so selfish desires would not fall out. And because I remained quiet for so long now my daughter does not hear me. She sits by her fancy swimming pool and hears only her Sony Walkman, her cordless phone, her big, important husband asking her why they have charcoal and no lighter fluid. All these years I kept my true nature hidden, running along like a small shadow so nobody could catch me. And because I moved so secretly now my daughter does not see me. She sees a list of things to buy, her checkbook out of balance, her ashtray sitting crooked on a straight table. And I want to tell her this: We are lost, she and I, unseen and not seeing, unheard and not hearing, unknown by others.

I can’t find out anything, but I’ve put together a network. I’ll find her.” “The thing is, she doesn’t want to be found. That isn’t going to make things any easier.” He didn’t want to ask, but he had to know. “Why doesn’t she want to be found?” “Because you’re marrying Audrey at Christmas,” Colby said simply. “I’m not marrying Audrey,” came the sort reply. “I never meant to marry Audrey. She outflanked me while I was getting used to the idea of being a media snack.” “Well, Cecily doesn’t know that,” Colby replied. “Great,” he muttered. “That’s just great. I leave the country and come home to find myself engaged to a woman I wouldn’t have, at any price!” “That’s not the only reason Cecily left,” Colby said tersely. “She knew you wouldn’t forgive her for not telling you about Matt Holden.” Tate ran a hand through his hair, missing the former length of it. “I’ve had a rough few weeks.” “So has she,” the other man said curtly. “She could have told me about my mother and Holden!” “Cecily gives her word and keeps it. There aren’t a lot of people on the planet who could make that claim. She promised the senator she wouldn’t tell you anything.” The senator. His father. Tate paced with the phone to his ear, his mind busy with possible places she might have gone to. “She might have told my mother where she was going.” “I’d bet good money that she didn’t,” Colby returned immediately. “She doesn’t want you to find her.” Tate stopped pacing. He scowled. “She doesn’t want me to find her?” “Actually, she doesn’t want any of us to find her. Especially you.” Tate’s eyes narrowed thoughtfully. “Any particular reason for that? Other than what I already know?” “Oh, boy.” Colby made a rough sound in his throat. “I still don’t think I should tell you. But if something should happen to her…” “Damn you, tell me!” Colby took a breath and went for broke. “All right. Cecily’s pregnant. That’s why she ran.” “You son of a bitch!” The phone slammed down so hard that Colby shuddered at the noise. He put the receiver down with a grimace. He shouldn’t have blown Cecily’s cover. But what else could he do? She was pregnant and alone and an attempt had been made on her life. It Tate wasn’t told, and Cecily was hurt or lost the baby, he might never get over it. That went double for Tate.

My sleep cycle is a bit more elaborate. The seven stages of sleep (according to my body) STAGE 1: You take the maximum dose of sleeping pills, but they don’t work at all and then you glare at their smug bottles at three a.m., whispering, “You lying bastards.” STAGE 2: You fall asleep for eight minutes and you have that dream where you’ve missed a semester of classes and don’t know where you’re supposed to be and when you wake up you realize that even in sleep you’re fucking your life up. STAGE 3: You close your eyes for just a minute but never lose consciousness and then you open your eyes and realize it’s been hours since you closed your eyes and you feel like you’ve lost time and were probably abducted by aliens. STAGE 4: This is the sleep that you miss because you’re too busy looking up “Symptoms of Alien Abduction” on your phone. STAGE 5: This is the deep REM sleep that recharges you completely and doesn’t actually exist but is made up by other people to taunt you. STAGE 6: You hover in a state of half sleep when you’re trying to stay under but someone is touching your nose and you think it’s a dream but now someone is touching your mouth and you open your eyes and your cat’s face is an inch from yours and he’s like, “BOOP. I got your nose.” STAGE 7: You finally fall into the deep sleep you desperately need. Sadly, this sleep only comes after you’re supposed to be awake, and you feel guilty about getting it because you should have been up hours ago but you’ve been up all night and now your arms are missing.

We were both seniors in college when we learned she had cancer. By then we weren’t at St. Thomas anymore. We’d both transferred to the University of Minnesota after that first year—she to the Duluth campus, I to the one in Minneapolis—and, much to our amusement, we shared a major. She was double majoring in women’s studies and history, I in women’s studies and English. At night, we’d talk for an hour on the phone. I was married by then, to a good man named Paul. I’d married him in the woods on our land, wearing a white satin and lace dress my mother had sewn. After she got sick, I folded my life down. I told Paul not to count on me. I would have to come and go according to my mother’s needs. I wanted to quit school, but my mother ordered me not to, begging me, no matter what happened, to get my degree. She herself took what she called a break. She only needed to complete a couple more classes to graduate, and she would, she told me. She would get her BA if it killed her, she said, and we laughed and then looked at each other darkly. She’d do the work from her bed. She’d tell me what to type and I’d type it. She would be strong enough to start in on those last two classes soon, she absolutely knew. I stayed in school, though I convinced my professors to allow me to be in class only two days each week. As soon as those two days were over, I raced home to be with my mother. Unlike Leif and Karen, who could hardly bear to be in our mother’s presence once she got sick, I couldn’t bear to be away from her. Plus, I was needed. Eddie was with her when he could be, but he had to work. Someone had to pay the bills.

What did she say?" Gavin snapped. René was right beside Tony in case Gavin became violent. He didn't want to fight Gavin, but he also didn't want Gavin attacking his newest child because he was the one receiving Lissa's mindspeech. Winkler and Roff had left the safe house the moment Gavin became angry. "She said something about not liking the holding cells," Tony said, watching Gavin carefully. "Inform her, please, that she is still recuperating from two gunshot wounds to her chest. Inform her please, that I am about to lose my mind. Inform her, please, that I have already lost my temper and I have been commanded by Wlodek to let him know if she goes off on her own at any time. Inform her, please, that the hole I am about to put in the wall is her fault and no other's." Gavin set his cell phone carefully on the tiny kitchen table and then punched his fist through the cinderblocks of the wall so swiftly even Tony couldn't follow it.

I’d like you to come to Kauai with me,” I say. “And Scottie. I think it would be good to get her away from the hospital for a day. We can leave in the morning, find him, and be home tomorrow night. If it takes us a day longer, that’s fine, but we won’t stay more than two nights. That’s our deadline. If we don’t find him, then at least we know we tried.” “And this will make you feel better somehow?” “It’s for her,” I say. “Not for him or me.” “What if he’s a wreck? What if he loses his shit?” “Then I’ll take care of him.” I imagine Brian Speer wailing on my shoulder. I imagine him and my daughters by Joanie’s bed, her lover and his loud sobs shaming us. “Just so you know, I am angry. I’m not this pure and noble guy. I want to do this for her, but I also want to see who he is. I want to ask him a few things.” “Just call him. Tell his office it’s an emergency. They’ll have him call you.” “I want to tell him in person. I haven’t told anyone over the phone, and I don’t want to start now.” “You told Troy.” “Troy doesn’t count. I just need to do this. On the phone he can escape. If I see him in person, he’ll have nowhere to go.” We both look away when our eyes meet. She hasn’t crossed the border into my room. She never does during her nighttime doorway chats. “Were you guys having trouble?” Alex asks. “Is that why she cheated?” “I didn’t think we were having trouble,” I say. “I mean, it was the same as always.” This was the problem, that our marriage was the same as always. Joanie needed bumps. She needed rough terrain. It’s funny that I can get lost in thoughts about her, but when she was right in front of me, I didn’t think much about her at all. “I wasn’t the best husband,” I say. Alex looks out the window to avoid my confession. “If we go on this trip, what will we tell Scottie?” “She’ll think we’re going on a trip of some sort. I want to get her away from here.

told me more about what happened the other night?” she asked, deciding to air her worst fears. “Am I under suspicion or something?” “Everyone is.” “Especially ex-wives who are publicly humiliated on the day of the murder, right?” Something in Montoya’s expression changed. Hardened. “I’ll be back,” he promised, “and I’ll bring another detective with me, then we’ll interview you and you can ask all the questions you like.” “And you’ll answer them?” He offered a hint of a smile. “That I can’t promise. Just that I won’t lie to you.” “I wouldn’t expect you to, Detective.” He gave a quick nod. “In the meantime if you suddenly remember, or think of anything, give me a call.” “I will,” she promised, irritated, watching as he hurried down the two steps of the porch to his car. He was younger than she was by a couple of years, she guessed, though she couldn’t be certain, and there was something about him that exuded a natural brooding sexuality, as if he knew he was attractive to women, almost expected it to be so. Great. Just what she needed, a sexy-as-hell cop who probably had her pinned to the top of his murder suspect list. She whistled for the dog and Hershey bounded inside, dragging some mud and leaves with her. “Sit!” Abby commanded and the Lab dropped her rear end onto the floor just inside the door. Abby opened the door to the closet and found a towel hanging on a peg she kept for just such occasions, then, while Hershey whined in protest, she cleaned all four of her damp paws. “You’re gonna be a problem, aren’t you?” she teased, then dropped the towel over the dog’s head. Hershey shook herself, tossed off the towel, then bit at it, snagging one end in her mouth and pulling backward in a quick game of tug of war. Abby laughed as she played with the dog, the first real joy she’d felt since hearing the news about her ex-husband. The phone rang and she left the dog growling and shaking the tattered piece of terry cloth. “Hello?” she said, still chuckling at Hershey’s antics as she lifted the phone to her ear. “Abby Chastain?” “Yes.” “Beth Ann Wright with the New Orleans Sentinel.” Abby’s heart plummeted. The press. Just what she needed. “You were Luke Gierman’s wife, right?” “What’s this about?” Abby asked warily as Hershey padded into the kitchen and looked expectantly at the back door leading to her studio. “In a second,” she mouthed to the Lab. Hershey slowly wagged her tail. “Oh, I’m sorry,” Beth Ann said, sounding sincerely rueful. “I should have explained. The paper’s running a series of articles on Luke, as he was a local celebrity, and I’d like to interview you for the piece. I was thinking we could meet tomorrow morning?” “Luke and I were divorced.” “Yes, I know, but I would like to give some insight to the man behind the mike, you know. He had a certain public persona, but I’m sure my readers would like to know more about him, his history, his hopes, his dreams, you know, the human-interest angle.” “It’s kind of late for that,” Abby said, not bothering to keep the ice out of her voice. “But you knew him intimately. I thought you could come up with some anecdotes, let people see the real Luke Gierman.” “I don’t think so.” “I realize you and he had some unresolved issues.” “Pardon me?” “I caught his program the other day.” Abby tensed, her fingers holding the phone in a death grip. “So this is probably harder for you than most, but I still would like to ask you some questions.” “Maybe another time,” she hedged and Beth Ann didn’t miss a beat. “Anytime you’d like. You’re a native Louisianan, aren’t you?” Abby’s neck muscles tightened. “Born and raised, but you met Luke in Seattle when he was working for a radio station . . . what’s the call sign, I know I’ve got it somewhere.” “KCTY.” It was a matter of public record. “Oh, that’s right. Country in the City. But you grew up here and went to local schools, right? Your

I made an appointment with a sleep doctor, who explained that during the sleep study people would be watching me sleep and monitoring my brain waves to see how I reacted during the four stages of sleep. I'd explain those stages if I could spell all the complicated words but they basically range from "Wide awake" to "Just barely not dead." My sleep cycle is a bit more elaborate. The seven stages of sleep (according to my body) STAGE 1: You take the maximum dose of sleeping pills, but they don't work at all and then you glare at their smug bottles at three a.m., whispering, "You lying bastards." STAGE 2: You fall asleep for eight minutes and you have that dream where you've missed a semester of classes and don't know where you're supposed to be and when you wake up you realize that even in your sleep you're fucking your life up. STAGE 3: You close your eyes for just a minute but never lose consciousness and then you open your eyes and realize it's been hours since you closed your eyes and you feel like you've lost time and were probably abducted by aliens. STAGE 4: This is the sleep that you miss because you're too busy looking up "Symptoms of Alien Abduction" on your phone. STAGE 5: This is the deep REM sleep that recharges you completely and doesn't actually exist but is made up by other people to taunt you. STAGE 6: You hover in a state of half sleep when you're trying to stay under but someone is touching your nose and you think it's a dream but now someone is touching your mouth and you open your eyes and your cat's face is an inch from yours and he's like, "BOOP. I got your nose." STAGE 7: You finally fall into the deep sleep you desperately need. Sadly, this sleep only comes after you're suppose to be awake, and you feel guilty about getting it because you should have been up hours ago but you've been up all night and now your arms are missing. I suspected that the only stage of sleep I'd have during the sleep study would be the sleep you don't get because strangers are watching you.

How did you find me?" "I've followed you for a long time." He must have mistaken the look on my face for alarm or fear, and said, "Not literally. I just mean I never lost track." But it wasn't fear, or anything like that. It was an instant of realization I'd have a lot in the coming days: I'd been thinking of him as coming back from the dead, but the fact was he'd been there all along. He'd been alive when I cried in my room over him being gone. He'd been alive when I started a new school without him, the day I made my first friend a Jones Hall, the time I ran into Ethan at the library. Cameron Quick and I had existed simultaneously on the planet during all of those moments. It didn't seem possible that we could have been leading separate lives, not after everything we'd been through together. "...then I looked you up online," he was saying, "and found your mom's wedding announcement from before you changed your name. I didn't even need to do that. It's easy to find someone you never lost." I struggled to understand what he was saying. "You mean...you could have written to me, or seen me, sooner?" "I wanted to. Almost did, a bunch of times." "Why didn't you? I wish you had." And I did, I wished it so much, imagined how it would have been to know all those years that he was there, thinking of me. "Things seemed different for you," he said, matter-of-fact. "Better. I could tell that from the bits of information I found...like an interview with the parents who were putting their kids in your school when it first started. Or an article about that essay contest you won a couple years ago." "You knew about that?" He nodded. "That one had a picture. I could see just from looking at you that you had a good thing going. Didn't need me coming along and messing it up." "Don't say that," I said quickly. Then: "You were never part of what I wanted to forget." "Nice of you to say, but I know it's not true." I knew what he was thinking, could see that he'd been carrying around the same burden all those years as me. "You didn't do anything wrong." It was getting cold on the porch, and late, and the looming topic scared me. I got up. "Let's go in. I can make coffee or hot chocolate or something?" "I have to go." "No! Already?" I didn't want to let him out of my sight. "Don't worry," he said. "Just have to go to work. I'll be around." "Give me your number. I'll call you." "I don't have a phone right now." "Find me at school," I said, "or anytime. Eat lunch with us tomorrow." He didn't answer. "Really," I continued, "you should meet my friends and stuff." "You have a boyfriend," he finally said. "I saw you guys holding hands." I nodded. "Ethan." "For how long?" "Three months, almost." I couldn't picture Cameron Quick dating anyone, though he must have at some point. If I'd found Ethan, I was sure Cameron had some Ashley or Becca or Caitlin along the way. I didn't ask. "He's nice," I added. "He's..." I don't know what I'd planned to say, but whatever it was it seemed insignificant so I finished that sentence with a shrug. "You lost your lisp." And about twenty-five pounds, I thought. "I guess speech therapy worked for both of us." He smiled. "I always liked that, you know. Your lisp. It was...you." He started down the porch steps. "See you tomorrow, okay?" "Yeah," I said, unable to take my eyes off of him. "Tomorrow.

I Never Told You You can fill a book with everything I never said Or the lines of a poem Or an Empty pool Or an empty bedroom, the candles all blown out I never told you how the reflection of myself in your eyes Was the only mirror I could bear to look at Or how I fought every day To transfuse the girl I saw there with the girl I am I tried to breathe in the words you made me: beautiful good brave I tried to be them for you even though they were weighted with impossibility I never told you how I always feared the rough edges of myself were too sharp for you and how I fought everyday to blunt them To bring down the walls To let you in without cutting you because I could never bear to hurt you like the others did Every day a fierce pride roared in me I was so lucky to know the truth I was the beneficiary of your radiance I basked in it and felt special And if not for the pain of your solitude I would have been content to be the only one I never told you How your touch made me feel like laughing and crying and singing all at once How your hand passing over my skin where atrocities Had not yet sloughed off, Skin cells remembering the worst touches Was like a tide washing over the ruddy sand And leaving it whole and smooth You made my skin forget Gave me new memories New sensations that didn't drag the shadows from the past In your arms I could start again, Start over. There is no greater gift in all the world Than you to the wreckage that is me... I never told you How I longed to kiss away your every bruise until there was no evidence No ghosts of your own suffering To put your pieces back together Seal the cracks Vanish them like they never were And never, ever Leave a scar I never told you I would take your pain if I could I would drink it down And take my comfort In making you ache a little less For a little while Did I? I'll never know because I never told you that I loved you I love you I love you It's too lat to say it now The time has passed for words How pathetic and small and weak On the phone Or on a piece of paper Starving Without the force of my own vitality My voice My breath My blood singing n my veins for you To give them power They are lost I love you It's too late but I love you And I'm sorry I never told you.

I suggest you stand slowly and walk out with my men,” Zrakovi said, tapping a napkin against his lying, two-faced mouth and putting a twenty on the table to cover the drinks. “If you make a scene, innocent humans will be injured. I have a Blue Congress cleanup team in place, however, so if you want to fight in public and damage a few humans, knock yourself out. It will only add to your list of crimes.” I stood slowly, gritting my teeth when Squirrel Chin patted me down while feeling me up and making it look like a romantic moment. He’d been so busy feeling the naughty bits that he missed both Charlie, sitting in my bag next to my foot, and the dagger attached to my inner forearm. Idiot. Alex would never have been so sloppy. If Alex had patted me down, he’d have found not only the weapons but also the portable magic kit. From the corner of my eye, I saw a tourist taking mobile phone shots of us. He’d no doubt email them to all his friends back home with stories of those crazy New Orleanians and their public displays of affection. I considered pretending to faint, but I was too badly outnumbered for it to work. Like my friend Jean Lafitte, whose help I could use about now, I didn’t want to try something unless it had a reasonable chance at succeeding. I also didn’t want to pull Charlie out and risk humans getting hurt. “Walk out the door onto Chartres and turn straight toward the cathedral.” Zrakovi pulled his jacket aside enough for me to see a shoulder holster. I hadn’t even known the man could hold a gun, although for all I knew about guns it could be a water pistol. The walk to the cathedral transport was three very long city blocks. My best escape opportunity would be near Jackson Square. When the muscular goons tried to turn me left toward the cathedral, I’d try to break and run right toward the river, where I could get lost among the wharves and docks long enough to draw and power a transport. Of course in order to run, I’d have to get away from the clinch of Dreadlocks and Squirrel Chin. Charlie could take care of that. I slipped the messenger bag over my head slowly, and not even Zrakovi noticed the stick of wood protruding from the top by a couple of inches. Not to be redundant, but . . . idiots. None of us spoke as we proceeded down Chartres Street, where, to our south, the clouds continued to build. The wind had grown stronger and drier. The hurricane was sucking all the humidity out of the air, all the better to gain intensity. I hoped Zrakovi, a Bostonian, would enjoy his first storm. I hoped a live oak landed on his head.

More than anything, we have lost the cultural customs and traditions that bring extended families together, linking adults and children in caring relationships, that give the adult friends of parents a place in their children's lives. It is the role of culture to cultivate connections between the dependent and the dependable and to prevent attachment voids from occurring. Among the many reasons that culture is failing us, two bear mentioning. The first is the jarringly rapid rate of change in twentieth-century industrial societies. It requires time to develop customs and traditions that serve attachment needs, hundreds of years to create a working culture that serves a particular social and geographical environment. Our society has been changing much too rapidly for culture to evolve accordingly. There is now more change in a decade than previously in a century. When circumstances change more quickly than our culture can adapt to, customs and traditions disintegrate. It is not surprising that today's culture is failing its traditional function of supporting adult-child attachments. Part of the rapid change has been the electronic transmission of culture, allowing commercially blended and packaged culture to be broadcast into our homes and into the very minds of our children. Instant culture has replaced what used to be passed down through custom and tradition and from one generation to another. “Almost every day I find myself fighting the bubble-gum culture my children are exposed to,” said a frustrated father interviewed for this book. Not only is the content often alien to the culture of the parents but the process of transmission has taken grandparents out of the loop and made them seem sadly out of touch. Games, too, have become electronic. They have always been an instrument of culture to connect people to people, especially children to adults. Now games have become a solitary activity, watched in parallel on television sports-casts or engaged in in isolation on the computer. The most significant change in recent times has been the technology of communication — first the phone and then the Internet through e-mail and instant messaging. We are enamored of communication technology without being aware that one of its primary functions is to facilitate attachments. We have unwittingly put it into the hands of children who, of course, are using it to connect with their peers. Because of their strong attachment needs, the contact is highly addictive, often becoming a major preoccupation. Our culture has not been able to evolve the customs and traditions to contain this development, and so again we are all left to our own devices. This wonderful new technology would be a powerfully positive instrument if used to facilitate child-adult connections — as it does, for example, when it enables easy communication between students living away from home, and their parents. Left unchecked, it promotes peer orientation.

For all the bachelors out there tonight, yeah for anybody who's never whistled this song. Maybe you whistled it but you lost the sheet music. Um...this is um...well actually I don't mind going to weddings or anything, as long as there not my own I show up. But I've always kinda been partial to calling myself up on the phone and asking myself out, you know? Oh yeah, you call yourself up too huh? Yeah, well one thing about it, your always around. Yeah I know, yeah you ask yourself out, you know, some class joint somewhere. The Buretto King or something, you know. Well I ain't cheap you know. Take yourself out for a couple of drinks maybe. Then there'd be some provocative conversation on the way home. Park in front of the house you know. Oh yeah, you smoothly put a little nice music on, maybe you put on like uh, you know, like shopping music, something thats not too interruptive you know and then uh slide over real nice and say 'Oh I think you have something in your eye'. Well maybe it's not that romantic with you but Christ I don't know, you know I get into it you know. Take myself up to the porch, take myself inside or maybe uh, or may get a little something, a brandy snifter or something. 'Would like you like to listen to some of my back records? I got something here' Uh Well usually about 2.30 in the morning you've ended up taking advantage of yourself. There ain't no way around that you know. Yeah, making a scene with a magazine, there ain't no way around. I'll confess you know, I'm no different you know. I'm not weird about it or anything, I don't tie myself up first. I just kinda spend a little time with myself

My greatest desire is to be human. In Islam, it is taught we are born man but we must evolve to be Human. To be human is to know compassion for others. to understand Ethics and morality, all of which we are born with but still must learn in practice.Our intellect does not make us human. Intelligence as shown that we separate ourselves more from humanity through our evolution of inventiveness than we have ever before. We depend on our gadgets to tell us to think and what to think. We have become servants of I-Phones and pads and computers and slaves to clocks that have now become our task master. We answer to alarms and "Tweets" and " FB Notifications like pavlovian dogs wagging our tails at each blip of a cybernetic announcement. We are further losing ourselves to technology that we thought would make our lives easier but has simply made it more complicated and filled it with less time for interaction with our fellow man because we have lost sight of verbal communication. Of being in eye contact with each other because our heads are leaning down into video screens and our ears are covered with sound buds.. We have become an extension of our devises when we should be an extension of each other in a real physical world and not the matrix of AI and computer stimuli we have become sadly slaves to. I want to be human and see the true smile of my friends and hear the real voice of their ideas and not typed words of color on a screen. I want to experience the knowledge of seeing my fellow men and woman talking verbally to each other and espousing real IDEAS and not merely replaying sound bytes hey have heard from the latest PROGRAMMING. I want to be HUMAN and know the Humanity of my brotherhood of HUMANS!

Uh, yeah,” I say awkwardly into my cell. “He’s, uh, really great in bed. Like, the greatest.” “Oh, brother,” Liam mutters under his breath. “How do I get myself into these things?” “There’s a porno that starts just like this!” Owen whispers excitedly to his friend. Carmen sighs happily. “This is such good news, darling!” she says in a wavering voice. “I’m—I’m sorry to have called so late. I know I probably woke you up. I—I just wanted to hear your voice. I’m so glad you’re coming. I have been hoping and praying to see you again for the longest time.” She begins to cry again softly. “Carm?” I say in concern. “Are you sure everything’s good?” “Oh, yes. I’m just—just don’t mind me. You know weddings make me emotional. I’ll see you soon, Hellie? You and your dashing doctor?” “Yeah. See you soon.” She hangs up the phone, and I do too. I let my head fall into my hands for a moment, as I go over the entire conversation a few times in my mind. I am left with the urge to scream at the top of my lungs, and run out into the forest, never to see these doctors again. “This is so humiliating,” I whisper. “I’m sorry. I don’t know why I said that. Carmen just gets under my skin.” “Why didn’t you pick me?” Owen said in disappointment. “Liam’s more suitable,” I explain with a groan. “He’s read my books, so he knows a little about me. He can bullshit that we have some previous connection. And also, he’s less likely to talk about porn.” “Fair enough,” Owen said unhappily, “but I would have liked to be a wedding crasher.” “Is your sister okay?” Liam asks. “Does she usually call you at 5 AM?” “Whoa,” I say in surprise. “Is it 5 AM?” My first thought is that something must be terribly wrong. I consider this for a moment. “It’s probably just pre-wedding jitters,” I tell the guys, trying to brush it off. “So you really want me to come

Dear Jon, A real Dear Jon let­ter, how per­fect is that?! Who knew you’d get dumped twice in the same amount of months. See, I’m one para­graph in and I’ve al­ready fucked this. I’m writ­ing this be­cause I can’t say any of this to you face-to-face. I’ve spent the last few months ques­tion­ing a lot of my friend­ships and won­der­ing what their pur­pose is, if not to work through big emo­tional things to­gether. But I now re­al­ize: I don’t want that. And I know you’ve all been there for me in other ways. Maybe not in the lit­eral sense, but I know you all would have done any­thing to fix me other than lis­ten­ing to me talk and al­low­ing me to be sad with­out so­lu­tions. And now I am writ­ing this let­ter rather than pick­ing up the phone and talk­ing to you be­cause, de­spite every thing I know, I just don’t want to, and I don’t think you want me to ei­ther. I lost my mind when Jen broke up with me. I’m pretty sure it’s been the sub­ject of a few of your What­sApp con­ver­sa­tions and more power to you, be­cause I would need to vent about me if I’d been friends with me for the last six months. I don’t want it to have been in vain, and I wanted to tell you what I’ve learnt. If you do a high-fat, high-pro­tein, low-carb diet and join a gym, it will be a good dis­trac­tion for a while and you will lose fat and gain mus­cle, but you will run out of steam and eat nor­mally again and put all the weight back on. So maybe don’t bother. Drunk­en­ness is an­other idea. I was in black­out for most of the first two months and I think that’s fine, it got me through the evenings (and the oc­ca­sional af­ter­noon). You’ll have to do a lot of it on your own, though, be­cause no one is free to meet up any more. I think that’s fine for a bit. It was for me un­til some­one walked past me drink­ing from a whisky minia­ture while I waited for a night bus, put five quid in my hand and told me to keep warm. You’re the only per­son I’ve ever told this story. None of your mates will be ex­cited that you’re sin­gle again. I’m prob­a­bly your only sin­gle mate and even I’m not that ex­cited. Gen­er­ally the ex­pe­ri­ence of be­ing sin­gle at thirty-five will feel dif­fer­ent to any other time you’ve been sin­gle and that’s no bad thing. When your ex moves on, you might be­come ob­sessed with the bloke in a way that is al­most sex­ual. Don’t worry, you don’t want to fuck him, even though it will feel a bit like you do some­times. If you open up to me or one of the other boys, it will feel good in the mo­ment and then you’ll get an emo­tional hang­over the next day. You’ll wish you could take it all back. You may even feel like we’ve en­joyed see­ing you so low. Or that we feel smug be­cause we’re win­ning at some­thing and you’re los­ing. Re­member that none of us feel that. You may be­come ob­sessed with work­ing out why ex­actly she broke up with you and you are likely to go fully, fully nuts in your bid to find a sat­is­fy­ing an­swer. I can save you a lot of time by let­ting you know that you may well never work it out. And even if you did work it out, what’s the pur­pose of it? Soon enough, some girl is go­ing to be crazy about you for some un­de­fin­able rea­son and you’re not go­ing to be in­ter­ested in her for some un­de­fin­able rea­son. It’s all so ran­dom and un­fair – the peo­ple we want to be with don’t want to be with us and the peo­ple who want to be with us are not the peo­ple we want to be with. Re­ally, the thing that’s go­ing to hurt a lot is the fact that some­one doesn’t want to be with you any more. Feel­ing the ab­sence of some­one’s com­pany and the ab­sence of their love are two dif­fer­ent things. I wish I’d known that ear­lier. I wish I’d known that it isn’t any­body’s job to stay in a re­la­tion­ship they don’t want to be in just so some­one else doesn’t feel bad about them­selves. Any­way. That’s all. You’re go­ing to be okay, mate. Andy

Reagan Truman’s cell phone clamored in the darkness. It took several rings to find it. “Hello,” she mumbled, hoping she didn’t wake her uncle in the next room. “Rea, this is Noah.” “It’s late, Noah.” She pulled she string on an old Tiffany-style lamp that was probably five times her age. Something was wrong; not even Noah called this late. “I know, Rea. But I need to talk to you.” She shoved her hair out of her face and tried to force sleep away. “All right, what’s up?” “I’m in the hospital, Rea. I was hurt tonight in Memphis.” “How bad?” she laughed nervously. She’d almost asked if he was still alive. There was a long pause on the line. “I don’t know. Bad. Broken arm, two ribs, but it’s my back that has me worried.” He didn’t speak for a moment. When he began again, he sounded more like a frightened boy than a man of twenty. “I’m hurt bad enough to maybe kick me off the circuit. When I hit the dirt, I was out cold. They said I kept yelling your name in the ambulance, but I don’t remember. All I remember is the pain.” “Noah, what can I do? Do you want me to go over to your folk’s house? I think they’re in town. I could call your sister, Alex.” “No, I don’t want them to worry. I know mom. She’ll freak out and dad will start lecturing me like I’m still a kid. I don’t want them to know anything until I know how serious it is. They’re still not telling me much yet.” He paused, and she knew he was fighting to keep his voice calm. “Rea, I got to face this before I ask them to. If it’s nothing, they don’t even need to know. If it’s crippling, I got to have a plan.” She understood. Noah had always been their positive, sunny child. The McAllens had already lost one son eight years ago. She’d seen the panic in their eyes once when Noah had been admitted to the hospital after an accident. She understood why he’d want to save them pain. “What can I do?” He was silent for a moment, and then he said simply, “Come get me. No matter how bad it is, I want you near when I find out.

There are things I can confess only after swallowing a bottle of ink. How i crushed a moth between my palms before it rushed to the fireplace. These hands that are used to killing things midflight. Like my mother tongue. Before I can roll out my rounded R and O. Because women like me are believed to practise witchcraft and blackmagic. We swallow men and spit out their bones. These hands that danced with your ghosts on the bluest 4 AMs. These hands that raised a knife to its throat. How deep was the longing to be nothing more than an empty bed, an empty room. If someone asks you tell them writing was the closest I came to witchcraft. Poetry was the closest I came to being possessed. I wanted to leave behind more than emptiness so I wrote. . They say it takes 7 seconds for the eyes to become accustomed to the darkness. I glide across the dark room like the light was never here. Your body imprint on the mattress lost to the frenzied waltz of sunray and dust. How easy was it to just grab a handful of you before you dissolved. If someone asks tell them loving you was the closest I came to seeing god. . On some nights I open the curtains and you are the moon. I am the darkness surrounding it. Which is to say I don't know how to love without being consumed. If they ask you tell them remembrance was the closest I came to being sick. . Once I met a homeless man who spoke in madness because he had forgotten his mother tongue. How long do you hide yourself from the world before you forget your beginning. Like him - I too am full of silence. My beloved - a handful of you, your body. There are things I could only tell the moths but they no longer visit. I have put off the fireplace. Which is to say they too don't know how to love something that won't kill them. . My phone always autocorrects I love you to I live you and what is love if not living the other person. One summer afternoon our bodies turned into each other's. Your breath played lye strings on my neck. If they ask you tell them that was the closest I came to being alive.

I hung up the phone after saying good night to Marlboro Man, this isolated cowboy who hadn’t had the slightest probably picking up the phone to say “I miss you.” I shuddered at the thought of how long I’d gone without it. And judging from the electrical charges searing through every cell of my body, I realized just how fundamental a human need it really is. It was as fundamental a human need, I would learn, as having a sense of direction in the dark. I suddenly realized I was lost on the long dirt road, more lost than I’d ever been before. The more twists and turns I took in my attempt to find my bearings, the worse my situation became. It was almost midnight, and it was cold, and each intersection looked like the same one repeating over and over. I found myself struck with an illogical and indescribable panic--the kind that causes you to truly believe you’ll never, ever escape from where you are, even though you almost always will. As I drove, I remembered every horror movie I’d ever watched that had taken place in a rural setting. Children of the Corn. The children of the corn were lurking out there in the tall grass, I just knew it. Friday the 13th. Sure, it had taken place at a summer camp, but the same thing could happen on a cattle ranch. And The Texas Chain Saw Massacre? Oh no. I was dead. Leatherface was coming--or even worse, his freaky, emaciated, misanthropic brother. I kept driving for a while, then stopped on the side of the road. Shining my brights on the road in front of me, I watched out for Leatherface while dialing Marlboro Man on my car phone. My pulse was rapid out of sheer terror and embarrassment; my face was hot. Lost and helpless on a county road the same night I’d emotionally decompensated in his kitchen--this was not exactly the image I was dying to project to this new man in my life. But I had no other option, short of continuing to drive aimlessly down one generic road after another or parking on the side of the road and going to sleep, which really wasn’t an option at all, considering Norman Bates was likely wandering around the area. With Ted Bundy. And Charles Manson. And Grendel.

Something diseased and furry had crawled into her mouth and expired while she slept. That was the only possible explanation as to why Neve had a rancid taste in her mouth and a heavy, viscous paste coating her teeth and tongue. ‘I think I’m dying,’ she groaned. The wretched state of her mouth was the least of it. There was a pounding in her head, echoed in the roiling of her gut, and her bones ached, her vital organs ached, her throat ached, even her hair follicles ached. ‘You’re not dying,’ said a voice in her ear, which sounded like nails scraping down a blackboard, even though Max’s voice had barely risen above a whisper. ‘You’ve got a hangover.’ Neve had had hangovers before and they just made her feel a tiny bit nauseous and grouchy. This felt like the bastard child of bubonic plague and the ebola virus. ‘Dying,’ she reiterated, and now she realised that she was in bed, which had been a very comfy bed the last time she’d slept in it, but now it felt as if she was lying on a pile of rocks, and even though she had the quilt and Max’s arm tucked around her, she was still cold and clammy. Neve tried to raise her head but her gaze collided with the stripy wallpaper and as well as searing her retinas, it was making her stomach heave. ‘Sick. Going to be sick.’ ‘Sweetheart, I don’t think so,’ Max said, stroking the back of her neck with feather-soft fingers. ‘You’ve already thrown up just about everything you’ve eaten in the last week.’ ‘Urgh …’ Had she? The night before was a big gaping hole in her memory. ‘What happened?’ ‘I don’t know what happened but I got a phone call from the Head of Hotel Security at three in the morning asking me if I could identify a raving madwoman in a silver dress who couldn’t remember her room number but insisted that someone called Max Pancake was sleeping there. They thought you might be a hack from the Sunday Mirror pretending to be absolutely spannered as a way of getting into the hotel.’ ‘Oh, no …’ ‘Yeah, apparently Ronaldo’s staying in one of the penthouse suites and I saw Wayne and Coleen in the bar last night. Anyway, as you were staggering down the corridor, you told me very proudly that you’d lost your phone and you’d just eaten two pieces of KFC and a bag of chips.’ ‘KFC? Oh, God …’ ‘But I wouldn’t worry about that because after you’d tried to persuade me to have my wicked way with you, you started throwing up and you didn’t stop, not for hours. I thought you were going to sleep curled around the toilet at one point.’ ‘Goodness …

You want to kiss her, right?” “What?” I have lost track of our conversation. I was thinking about how if Kit called me her friend, then I would have multiplied my number of them by a factor of two. And then I considered the word flirting, how it sounds like fluttering, which is what butterflies do. Which of course looped me back to chaos theory and my realization that I’d like to have more information to provide Kit on the topic. “Do. You. Want. To. Kiss. Her?” Miney asks again. “Yes, of course I do. Who wouldn’t want to kiss Kit?” “I don’t want to kiss Kit,” Miney says, doing that thing where she imitates me and how I answer rhetorical questions. Though her intention is to mock rather than to educate, it’s actually been a rather informative technique to demonstrate my tendency toward taking people too literally. “Mom doesn’t want to kiss Kit. I don’t know about Dad, but I doubt it.” My father doesn’t look up. His face is buried in a book about the mating patterns of migratory birds. It’s too bad our scholarly interests have never overlapped. Breakfast would be so much more interesting if we could discuss our work. “So if you want to kiss Kit, that means you want her to see you like a real guy,” Miney says, and points at me with her cup of coffee. She’s drinking it black. Maybe there’s nothing wrong with Miney. Maybe she’s just tired. “I am a real guy.” How come even my own sister sees me as something not quite human? Something other. “I have a penis.” “And just when I think we’ve made progress you go and mention your penis.” “What? Fact: I have a penis. That makes me a guy. Though technically there are some trans people who have penises but self-identify as girls.” “Please stop saying that word.” “What word? Penis?” “Yes.” “Do you prefer member? Shlong? Wang? Johnson?” I ask. “Dongle, perhaps?” “I would prefer we not discuss your man parts at all.” “Wait, should I text Kit immediately and clarify that I do in fact have man parts?” I pick up my phone and start typing. “Dear Kit. Just to be clear. I have a penis.” “Oh my God. Do not text her. Seriously, stop.” Miney puts her coffee down hard. She’ll climb over the table and tackle me if she has to. “Ha! Totally got you!” I smile, as proud as I was the other day for my that’s what she said joke. “Who are you?” Miney asks, but she’s grinning too. I’ll admit it takes a second—something about the disconnect between her confused tone and her happy face—and I almost, almost say out loud: Duh, I’m Little D. Instead I let her rhetorical question hang, just like I’m supposed to

You and Patrick looked awfully cozy,” Ryder says, setting Mama’s note back on the counter. So I was right--he had been watching us. “So?” “So, nothing.” He shrugs. “Just making an observation.” “Yeah, you never just make an observation. Oh, and you and Rosie looked pretty cozy, too. I sure hope you’re not leading her on. You know she likes you.” A muscle in his jaw works furiously as he shoves his cell phone back into his pocket. “That’s the kind of guy you think I am? Seriously, Jem?” I swallow hard, unable to reply. Because the truth is, I don’t know. “I’ll see you later,” he says, his voice cold and clipped. He turns and stalks out. For some unknown reason, I follow him--down the hall, out the front door. “Don’t walk out on me,” I holler as he rounds the Durango and opens the driver’s-side door. “If you have something to say to me, then say it.” He gets in and slams the car door shut, but I throw it open again. “C’mon,” I taunt, motioning with one hand. I’m totally losing it now--white spots dancing before my eyes, tears streaking down my cheeks. I can barely catch my breath, like I’m about to hyperventilate. This isn’t about Ryder, I realize. It’s about Nan. The sudden realization hits me hard. What if I never see her again? My knees buckle, and I start to go down. Somehow, Ryder manages to catch me just before I hit the ground. “Shit, Jemma! What’s the matter with you?” He drags me to my feet and presses me against the side of his truck. “Take a deep breath. Jesus!” I do what he says. By the third, I’ve slowed my heart rate to something nearing normal. Only, my cheeks are burning with mortification now. This is the second time I’ve broken down in front of Ryder. He must think I’ve lost my mind--that I’ve totally gone off the deep end. “Just go,” I say, my voice shaking. He rakes both hands through his hair. “Are you kidding me? I can’t leave you alone like this.” “Go,” I repeat, more forcefully this time. “Just get in your car and leave, okay?” “C’mon, Jemma. You know I can’t.” “I swear I’m okay.” I straighten my spine and lift my chin, trying my best to look calm, collected, and reasonably sane. “Seriously, Ryder. I just need to be alone right now.” “Fine,” he says, shaking his head. “If you say so.” I step away from the car, feeling queasy now as he slips inside and starts the engine. But before he pulls out, he rolls down his window and meets my gaze. His dark eyes look intense, full of conflict. For a split second, I wonder what’s going on inside his head--if he’s judging me. If he has any idea what I’m going through. If he even cares. “She’s going to be okay, Jemma,” he says, then slides his sunglasses on and drives away. I guess he does get it, after all.

I kept driving for a while, then stopped on the side of the road. Shining my brights on the road in front of me, I watched out for Leatherface while dialing Marlboro Man on my car phone. My pulse was rapid out of sheer terror and embarrassment; my face was hot. Lost and helpless on a county road the same night I’d emotionally decompensated in his kitchen--this was not exactly the image I was dying to project to this new man in my life. But I had no other option, short of continuing to drive aimlessly down one generic road after another or parking on the side of the road and going to sleep, which really wasn’t an option at all, considering Norman Bates was likely wandering around the area. With Ted Bundy. And Charles Manson. And Grendel. Marlboro Man answered, “Hello?” He must have been almost asleep. “Um…um…hi,” I said, squinting in shame. “Hey there,” he replied. “This is Ree,” I said. I just wanted to make sure he knew. “Yeah…I know,” he said. “Um, funniest thing happened,” I continued, my hands in a death grip on the steering wheel. “Seems I got a little turned around and I’m kinda sorta maybe perhaps a little tiny bit lost.” He chuckled. “Where are you?” “Um, well, that’s just it,” I replied, looking around the utter darkness for any ounce of remaining pride. “I don’t really know.” Marlboro Man assumed control, telling me to drive until I found an intersection, then read him the numbers on the small green county road sign, numbers that meant absolutely nothing to me, considering I’d never even heard the term “county road” before, but that would help Marlboro Man pinpoint exactly where on earth I was. “Okay, here we go,” I called out. “It says, um…CR 4521.” “Hang tight,” he said. “I’ll be right there.” Marlboro Man was right there, in less than five minutes. Once I determined the white pickup pulling beside my car was his and not that of Jason Voorhees, I rolled down my window. Marlboro Man did the same and said, with a huge smile, “Having trouble?” He was enjoying this, in the exact same way he’d enjoyed waking me from a sound sleep when he’d called at seven a few days earlier. I was having no trouble establishing myself as the clueless pansy-ass of our rapidly developing relationship. “Follow me,” he said. I did. I’ll follow you anywhere, I thought as I drove in the dust trail behind his pickup. Within minutes we were back at the highway and I heaved a sigh of relief that I was going to survive. Humiliated and wanting to get out of his hair, I intended to give him a nice, simple wave and drive away in shame. Instead, I saw Marlboro Man walking toward my car. Staring at his Wranglers, I rolled down my window again so I could hear what he had to say. He didn’t say anything at all. He opened my car door, pulled me out of the car, and kissed me as I’d never been kissed before. And there we were. Making out wildly at the intersection of a county road and a rural highway, dust particles in the air mixing with the glow of my headlights to create a cattle ranch version of London fog. It would have made the perfect cover of a romance novel had it not been for the fact that my car phone, suddenly, began ringing loudly.

One letter was addressed to me personally in large, shaky handwriting with little circles over the i's instead of dots. [...] It was from Sid. Dear Debbie [Nancy's mother], Thank you for phoning me the other night. It was so comforting to hear your voice. You are the only person who really understands how much Nancy and I love each other. Every day without Nancy gets worse and worse. I just hope that when I die I go the same place as her. Otherwise I will never find peace. Frank [Nancy's father] said in the paper that Nancy was born in pain and lived in pain all her life. When I first met her, and for about six months after that, I spent practically the whole time in tears. Her pain was just too much to bear. Because, you see, I felt Nancy's pain as though it were my own, worse even. But she said that I must be strong for her or otherwise she would have to leave me. So I became strong for her, and she began to stop having asthma attacks and seemed to be going through a lot less pain. [Nancy had had asthma since she was a child.] I realized that she had never known love and was desperately searching for someone to love her. It was the only thing she really needed. I gave her the love that she needed so badly and it comforts me to know that I made her very happy during the time we were together, where she had only known unhappiness before. Oh Debbie, I love her with such passion. Every day is agony without her. I know now that it is possible to die from a broken heart. Because when you love someone as much as we love each other, they become fundamental to your existence. So I will die soon, even if I don't kill myself. I guess you could say that I'm pining for her. I could live without food or .water longer than I'm going to survive without Nancy. Thank you so much for understanding us, Debbie. It means so much to me, and I know it meant a lot to Nancy. She really loves you, and so do I. How did she know when she was going to die? I always prayed that she was wrong, but deep inside I knew she was right. Nancy was a very special person, too beautiful for this world. I feel so privileged to have loved her and been loved by her. Oh Debbie, it was such a beautiful love. I can't go on without it. When we first met, we knew we were made for each other, and fell in love with each other immediately. We were totally inseparable and were never apart. We had certain telepathic abilities, too. I remember about nine months after we met, I left Nancy for a while. After a couple of weeks of being apart, I had a strange feeling that Nancy was dying. I went straight to the place she was staying and when I saw her, I knew it was true. I took her home with me and nursed her back to health, but I knew that if I hadn't bothered she would have died. Nancy was just a poor baby, desperate for love. It made me so happy to give her love, and believe me, no man ever loved a woman with such burning passion as I love Nancy. I never even looked at others. No one was as beautiful as my Nancy. Enclosed is a poem I wrote for her. It kind of sums up how much I love her. If possible, I would love to see you before I die. You are the only one who understood. Love, Sid XXX.

already laid out to get responses from “warm” e-mails. • Live and die by your Subject line. If you don’t, your e-mail may never get read. Focus on your strongest hook, either the contact you have in common or the specific value you have to offer. Make them curious. • Game the timing. There’s a lot of debate about the best time to e-mail, but I personally like to fire away when I think the person is apt to be spending time on e-mailing. Their morning, lunchtime, and the last hours of the workday are typical. • Be brief. Once you’ve written a draft, the “best” version of it is usually 50 percent shorter. Yes, we’re half as interesting as we think! Your e-mail should fit into a single screen. If I have to scroll to get to the point, I’ve already lost interest. • Have a clear call to action. What do you want them to do? Make your first request clear and easy. Request fifteen minutes on the phone, not just a vague phone call. Offer suggested dates and times, not just “a meeting sometime.” Short-circuit the process as much as you can, and don’t make them guess what you’re looking for. • Read it out loud. I had an assistant who would do this with every e-mail she wrote, and it always made me laugh when I caught her in the act. But she was smart. Listening to herself, she ensured that the language was clear and conversational, and she timed it, too, with a forty-five-second limit. • Spell-check. There’s no excuse for poor spelling and grammar in an e-mail. I’ve written two books and have a URL with my name in it, and I still get people e-mailing “Keith Ferazzi” with one “r.” I know you’ll do better.

Jack thinks I take things that’ll cover every eventuality, but I don’t. I only take what’s necessary. When I’m with my family, I bring what will keep them safe. But suppose you’re on your own, like I am now, and something happened to you, and you couldn’t get back, what would you need? What would be important to you? When you think about it like that, it’s surprisingly little. A credit card and a passport; a driving licence. Mini first-aid and wash kits. A decent moisturizer, lipstick and lip balm. It’s surprisingly freeing because, of course, you can’t take what is most important to you: your family and friends. I have photos, though, printed out, not just on a phone. Mobiles are easily lost, aren’t they? And two recipes, the ones I think I couldn’t live without. But all of it, when it comes down to it, is dispensable. Almost everything is.

tossed in a prison to wait on deportation. Now this. Now we’re supposed to somehow push it all aside and hustle back to law school for our last semester, which will be followed by two months in hell studying for the bar exam, so we can do something to make a little money and start repayment, which, actually, is far more impossible than it seems, and it seems awfully damned impossible at the moment. Yes, Zola dear, I’m tired. Aren’t you?” “I’m beyond exhausted,” she said. “That makes three of us,” Todd added. They slowed and passed through the small town of Boyce. When it was behind them, Mark asked, “Are you guys really going to class on Monday? I’m not.” “That’s either the second or the third time you’ve said that,” Zola said. “If you don’t go to class, then what are your plans?” “I have no plans. My status will be day to day.” “Okay, but what are you going to do when the law school starts calling?” Todd asked. “I won’t take their calls.” “Okay, so they’ll put you on inactive status and notify your loan sharks and they’ll be out for blood.” “What if they can’t find me? What if I change phone numbers and move to another apartment? It would be easy to get lost in a city of two million people.” “I’m listening,” Todd said. “So, you start hiding. What about work and income and those little challenges?” “I’ve been thinking about that,” Mark said and took a long swig. “Maybe I’ll get a job tending bar, for cash, of course. Maybe wait tables. Or maybe I’ll become a DUI specialist like that sleazeball we met last Friday at the city jail. What was his name?” “Darrell Cromley,” Zola said. “I’ll bet Darrell nets a hundred grand a year hustling DUIs. All cash.” “But you don’t have a license,” Zola said. “Did we ask Darrell to show us his license? Of course not. He said he was a lawyer.

ELECTIVE MUTISM Social anxiety appears in many forms, some of which are only now coming to light. Socially anxious children, for example, are usually thought of as quiet and reserved and of course “shy.” But some children, though they function fairly well in their home environment, have great difficulty talking in social situations. Donny was one such child. At fourteen, he managed quite well at home, but never talked to his peers. His parents encouraged him to join in group activities, and even sent him off to an overnight camp. But he remained silent, even when he became lost in the woods. The child was alone for several hours; dusk was approaching, and he began to get cold, but he still could not bring himself to call out. The counselors were near enough for him to attract their attention and yet he remained mute. Alarm bells went off for Melanie when she noticed that her daughter at age three had trouble talking with people outside their home. When the little girl went to see Santa Claus, and he asked her what she wanted for Christmas, she became hysterical and couldn’t respond verbally. And the problem continued: She would speak only with the immediate family, and never to peers or potential playmates. Elective mutism is a very specific symptom of social anxiety. Fear turns into panic which inhibits speech; the elective mute is capable—physically—of speaking to outsiders, but anxiety prevents him or her from speaking. Only recently has there been any media attention paid to this syndrome, and research in this area has just begun. After an article appeared in a New York-area newspaper, however, someone who had expressed interest in starting a self-help group for elective mutes was besieged with phone calls from desperate relatives, eager to get help for their silent family members. I have worked with people of all ages who suffer from varying degrees of elective mutism. From my perspective, elective mutism is treatable relatively easily in childhood or early adolescence. But treating the adult is very difficult because of the pervasive progression of the problem.

I’m guilty too. So guilty. I should have been a better mother when there was still time. I tried so hard, but I made so many mistakes. Not just the commonplace failures. The times I lost my temper or burrowed into my phone instead of looking them in the eyes.

A blaring ringing sound causes me to bolt upright. I am so on edge that I feel like I jumped three feet off the bed. I take a deep breath to try and relax before reaching for my phone, which is resting just beside my pillow. I am a bit puzzled by the name on the display. Lauren. It’s an old co-worker. Why would she be calling at 5 a.m.? It doesn’t matter. I’m just glad to have someone to talk to. Anyone will do. Accepting the call, I summon my cheerful work-voice. “Good morning, Lauren!

I've never known anyone with the capacity for sugar that Adeena has. She'd demolished her waffles, which she'd drowned in syrup, and then ordered a slice of triple chocolate tuxedo pie, another sugar bomb. If I ate the way she'd did, I'd have lost a foot to diabetes by now. Martha slid our desserts in front of us, and Adeena and I hummed in appreciation after taking our first bites. The lemon icebox cake was cold and creamy, with a background sweetness and a whole lot of tang. As I often did when sampling delicious desserts, I tried to deconstruct what was in it. Graham crackers, cream cheese, whipped cream, and a ton of lemon curd seemed to be the basis of the recipe. Similar to the ginger calamansi pie I'd made, but simpler and no-bake, if I decided to buy the graham crackers instead of making my own. Definitely worth experimenting with, as I had a jar of calamansi curd tucked away in the fridge just begging to be used. I made a note on my phone later, maybe as a summer offering. As per usual when eating out, Adeena and I swapped plates so we could taste each other's desserts. "What do you think, girls?" I grinned at Martha. "Delicious. I love how the lemon cake is sweet and tangy, but you don't go too far in either direction." Adeena added, "It's the perfect counterpoint to my chocolate pie, which is divine, by the way. Rich, creamy, and so satisfying.

Getting Off the Island of Lost Boys and Girls The first step to getting off this God-forsaken island is to understand ministry is wherever you are as a disciple of Jesus. When I first chose the public-university route, Christian friends would say, “Wow, I’m really surprised you’re not going into ministry.” But they had no idea of the ministry happening all around me, through me, and growing inside of me. They weren’t there when I carried my drunk classmate to her dorm room at 3:00 a.m. and slept on her floor to make sure she was safe. They weren’t hearing the midnight conversations between my Jewish roommate and me. They didn’t know how much ministry was happening as I lit the menorah with her at Hanukkah or how the presence of God filled our room as we read the Easter story together that same year. They didn’t know about the lunches with my atheist professors who wore me down as they challenged my charismatic upbringing and tried to tell me there was no God. They didn’t see me wrestling with my faith and that with each day God was perfecting it. Ministry is all around us, and if we let him, he’ll show us it isn’t confined to a position in a church building that we fear can be stolen. It’s in the everyday hugs and phone calls we make, in teachers grading papers and doctors charting medical information, in stay-at-home moms and dads packing lunches with little notes where Jesus shows up, and the Kingdom advances because we are right where he wants us. When we learn that ministry is right where we are, we go big, we don’t hold back, and we don’t wait for something better. We stop being afraid it can be stolen. We don’t care if we’re overlooked. It might be holding back your roommate’s hair after a long night of partying or rocking a sleeping baby or mowing your neighbor’s lawn. This isn’t selfie material. Setting sail with the Great Commission (go and make disciples) and the Great Commandment (love God and love people) as our North Star keeps us off the Island of Lost Boys and Girls.

Champions keep it in perspective.  They are able to accept responsibility and recognize the situation as a temporary setback nothing more, nothing less.  Yes it hurts, so they look at it, learn from it, and then let it go.  I’ve lost myself, of course. In fact, that was how I met Leo-tai in the first place. I was a young martial artist competing in tournaments and I’d just lost a major international competition—worse still, one that I’d been really expecting to win. I was having a tough time with the loss. People kept telling me, “You still did great!” But runner-up wasn’t what I’d wanted to be.  As time went by, in response to my annoyance with myself, my training tailed off, my determination flagged, and everything seemed either too boring or too difficult to fuss about.  I was slacking off. I remember an older kid asking me once if I had ever heard of Coach Leo. “I don’t think so,” I said. “What does he teach?” “Mostly Shaolin—Chinese Kickboxing, but he teaches other things too.  He really helped me once with my training.” “So, how’d he help then?” I asked, interested. “Call him, here’s his number.  He only teaches small classes.  Tell him you know me.” I carried that sheet of paper around with me for about two weeks.  Finally I thought, “Well, what have I got to lose?”  I called him and told him about myself.  Coach Leo listened quietly on the phone, so much so that I began to wonder if he’d wandered off or hung up. “Come tomorrow,” he told me, and that ended our conversation. When the next day came, I almost didn’t go.  I kept asking myself, “Why did I call this coach?”  I was looking for a reason to miss our appointment.  But before I knew it, and despite my best efforts to talk myself out of it, I wound up knocking on his door and then there he was.  A medium-sized, elderly, rather stoic figure, his face calm and genuine.

I realised I had, for over twenty years now, been sending out and receiving signals with large numbers of people all throughout the day. Texts, Facebook messages, phone calls - they were all little ways in which the world seemed to say: I see you. I hear you. We need you. Signal back. Signal more. Now the signals were gone, and it felt like the world was saying - you don't matter. ...I would often start conversations with people - on the beach, in bookstores, in cafes - and they were often friendly, but the conversations seemed to have a low social temperature compared to the web-based ones I had lost. No stranger is going to flood you with hearts and tell you you're great. For years I had derived a large part of my meaning in life from the thin, insistent signals of the web. Now they were gone, and I could see how paltry and lacking in substance they were. But, still, I missed them.

Did I develop my own set of random assumptions by utilizing the very little information available to me? For example, Leo Vodnik had held a magazine titled Construction Engineering Australia. Men are ten times more likely than women to die at work. Is that all it took for me to predict a “workplace accident” as his cause of death? Ethan Chang had his arm in a cast. Was it his injury that made me choose “assault,” together with the fact that injury and violence is a leading cause of death for young adult men? I know I watched Kayla Halfpenny at the airport and saw her knock over her drink and then her phone. Was it my observation of the sweet girl’s clumsiness together with the fact that road traffic injuries are one of the leading causes of death among young adults that led me to say “car accident”? Did I simply make random choices? Is that what led me to pancreatic cancer, the most feared cancer, for the vibrant woman who reminded me of my friend Jill, and breast cancer for the pregnant woman? Did I temporarily believe I was Madame Mae? I must have been thinking of my mother, because I kept saying “fate won’t be fought.” Had I somehow become a strange alchemy of the two of us? Both of us, after all, specialized in predictions. There are certain events in my life that I believe may have had a profound effect on me. For example: the little boy who drowned at the blowhole when I was a child. I have never forgotten the sound of his mother screaming. That boy had brown eyes and dark hair. When I saw that dear little brown-eyed, dark-haired baby, did I think of that poor boy and therefore predict the baby would drown at the same age? Did I look at the young bride, Eve, and remember the charming woman who came to my mother for readings, who was so excited about her forthcoming wedding, the first wedding I ever attended? Did I think of the time I saw her at the shops, her inner light snuffed out, and remember how she died in a fire believed to have been lit by her husband? Why did I choose self-harm for Allegra, the beautiful flight attendant? Was it simply that I saw repressed pain in her eyes from the back injury I now know she suffered on that flight? Was it because I knew the rate of suicide in young females has been steadily increasing over recent years? Was I thinking of death as I boarded the plane and contemplating the fact that everyone on that plane would one day die, and wondering what their causes of death would ultimately be? Well. That’s the only one of my questions I can answer with certainty. Of course I was thinking of death. I had my husband’s ashes in my carry-on bag. I was missing my two best friends. I was thinking of every person I had ever lost throughout my life.

Dylan lifted my chin so my lips could meet his. I kissed him hard, suddenly overwhelmed with emotion I’d held tight inside me. “Good things happen,” I said, crying now. “Sometimes I forget that even when I have a blessing right in front of me.” Dylan wrapped me tighter in his arms and smiled against my lips. “Me too, but I never lost faith in little Lark. If anyone could kick death in the ass, it would be her.” I laughed at the thought of Lark versus the Grim Reaper. When my laughter drew the attention of the others, they laughed too, even without knowing why. All the tension faded as our fears turned to celebration. “Shit, I’m gonna get teary-eyed,” Vaughn announced, looking at his phone. We all received the same message from Raven with pictures of the babies. “Which one’s the girl?” Judd asked, squinting at Tawny’s phone. “The one with the pink hat,” his wife said. Everyone laughed again. “You can’t see if they have curly hair,” Cooper muttered. “Man, I hope at least one of them does. I’m never letting Aaron live that shit down.” More laughter as everyone enjoyed the additional photos Raven sent.

I couldn’t get on the phone and say, “Bim, I’m going to White Plains. Follow me.” Instead, I hoped that he would notice us heading away in my H2 and discreetly follow us. I drove slowly, as usual, so I wouldn’t lose my tail. My torpor behind the wheel always drove Greg crazy. “You drive like an old lady!” he complained. “Hurry up, Jackie boy! It takes you a fucking hour to drive what it takes me half an hour!” “I always go slow,” I told him. “I get flashbacks from an accident I had when I was a kid.” If Greg had been in a hurry, he would have told me, “We gotta get there fast. You’re not fucking driving.” I’d follow him and pretend to get lost, just to zing him. But that wasn’t happening this time. We were all in one car, my car, and I still had no idea what we were doing. On the way, Greg finally explained the nature of our mission. “We’re going to Bloomingdale’s,” he said. “We’re going to find that cocksucker Petey Chops.” Okay, so today’s not my day to get killed. That’s a positive. But why would we look for a recalcitrant Mafia soldier in a department store? Greg volunteered no more information, and as a member of his crew, I was in no position to inquire.

I’d heard a few stories from his friends already, and they were buzzing around in my head. Curly said that when Jep was trying to use his phone, he said, “Jessica,” one of the few things he said that made any sense. Another story, that would have been funny in almost any other context, was that at one point Jep looked up and said, in a clear voice, “I have to get money from Willie.” Another friend told me that back at the lodge, while they were waiting for the ambulance, Jep kept wanting to walk outside and head for the woods. I shuddered in fear at that story--the deer camp was in the middle of 55,000 acres of woods. If Jep had been alone and wandered off into the woods by himself, he might’ve been lost forever. When that thought came, I put my hand lightly on his arm. He was quiet, for the moment, still strapped securely to the gurney. We might’ve lost you, I thought. We’ve been through so much together. I can’t lose you now.

This internship was my future, an opportunity to stay in Texas with a promise to never have to move back to Colorado. Problem was…the hospital elevator had other plans. Waiting at ground level, I pushed the up button and stared at the shiny metal doors waiting for them to glide open. Nothing. I glanced up at the glowing number four, begging for it to start its descent to one. But it didn’t budge. How long did it take for people to get on? I checked my phone. My earliness could quickly creep to tardiness if the elevator didn’t hurry. Or made multiple stops. Or I got lost. Shit.

Stop talking,” I whisper. “Seriously, stop talking right now.” “Why?” he says, somewhat hurt at the interruption. “Because I’m pretty sure that if you keep talking like this... I’ll have to marry you, or something,” I explain nervously. “So just zip it.” “You’ll have to...” Liam is repeating what I said in confusion, when his car door opens. “Okay!” Owen says. “I filled up the tank, and got popsicles. But Liam, you’re going to have to take the wheel, so I can play games on my phone. It’s very important. And if you don’t want to drive, I’m unwrapping your popsicle and tossing it on the ground.” “Fine,” Liam says, and there is the sound of crinkling plastic as he grabs the popsicle and gets out of the car. I am very surprised that this mild level of blackmail is so effective. Liam really is a softie. I feel the car shift as Owen lunges into the seat in front of me. I flinch when a cold plastic item is pressed against my cheek. “Your popsicle, as requested, milady!” Owen says happily. Lifting my hand, I take the popsicle away from Owen. I smile as I begin to unwrap the item, so I can press the sweet concoction against my tongue. Just as I taste the frozen sugar-water, the driver’s side door opens and a cold wind blasts into the car. I shiver. “Dammit. I should have thought of something

I need some time for the rest. I just don’t take something like marriage lightly. If I do it, I’ll mean it, and I won’t change my mind. But I think you’d do it right now for all the wrong reasons.” “Does this have anything to do with the guy you didn’t let stay last night?” he asked. “My boyfriend?” she asked, smiling. She knew it was naughty to taunt him like that; she wasn’t thinking of T.J. as a boyfriend at the moment. “It would be nice of me to tell him if things change in my personal life. But until I have matters settled…” “No, Franci, tell him matters are settled. You won’t be dating him!” “And the woman who keeps calling you?” “What woman?” he asked. “Your phone keeps picking up text messages and voice mails. That has to be a woman.” He took a deep breath. This didn’t seem like a good time to lie, just as he was trying to close a deal. “I dated this girl a few times back at Beale and I told her I wasn’t getting into a steady thing. When I went on leave, I told her we had to cool it because it wasn’t working for me, but she’s deaf. I thought when I left town for a couple of months she’d let it go, but she’s hounding me. I’m going to call her, Franci, and tell her I’m off the market. That I’m getting married. She won’t call anymore. Now, come on.” “Poor thing,” Franci said. “She might be as sick in love with you as I was.” “As you were?” he asked, a little frightened of the answer. “And I said I’m not marrying you.” “Okay, let me get this right—I suggested marriage and you said no?” “How about that? What a shocker, huh?” “Well, what the hell am I supposed to do? I thought that’s what I should do!” “Okay, you still don’t get it. We don’t want to because you’re doing what you should. Listen carefully, Sean. I want you to be absolutely sure you want to commit to a life with me and Rosie, because you don’t have to marry me to have time with your daughter. She’s your daughter—I won’t get in the way of that. Though I have to admit, the way you suggested marriage really just knocked me off my feet.” He would never admit it to anyone, but her refusal gave him an instant feeling of relief. He wasn’t ready to take it all on. But it would sure make things tidier if they could just do it the way it probably should be done. He slid close to her and, before she could protest, pulled her right up against him. “You wanna get knocked off your feet, sweetheart? Because we both know we do that to each other.” He put a big hand around the back of her neck and ran his thumb from her earlobe to the hollow of her throat. Then he kissed that spot. “I want you with me, Franci. Tonight, and from now on.” “Sean,” she said gravely, “when you rejected me four years ago, there were times I wondered if I’d lost my mind and my heart. The things we said to each other—I don’t want to risk a marriage like that. After we split and I moved to Santa Rosa, sometimes I grieved so badly I worried that I was hurting the baby with endless crying, sleepless nights, loss of appetite. I just can’t face something like that again.” He ran a knuckle across her soft cheek. “Baby, I didn’t reject you. I wanted to be with you—I just had a hang-up with marriage.” “Well, now the shoe’s on the other foot. Suck it up.” Life

From inside the Contuzzi apartment I heard the phone ring. Once, twice, three times. “Bolitar?” It stopped after six rings. “We know you’re still in London. Where are you?” I hung up and looked at Mario’s door. The ringing phone—ringing like a phone used to, not like some ringtone on a cell—had sounded very much like a landline. Hmm. I put my hand on the door. Thick and sturdy. I pressed my ear against the cool surface, hit Mario’s cell phone number, watched the LCD display on my mobile. It took a moment or two before the connection went through. When I heard the faint chime of Mario’s cell phone through the door—the landline had been loud; this was not—dread flooded my chest. True, it may be nothing, but most people nowadays do not travel even the shortest of distances, including bathroom visits, without the ubiquitous cell phone clipped or carried upon their person. You can bemoan this fact, but the chances that a guy working in television news would leave his cell phone behind while heading to his office seemed remote. “Mario?” I shouted. I started pounding on the door. “Mario?” I didn’t expect him to answer, of course. I pressed my ear against the door again, listening for I’m not sure what—a groan maybe. A grunt. Calling out. Something. No sound. I wondered about my options. Not many. I reared back, lifted my heel, and kicked the door. It didn’t budge. “Steel-enforced, mate. You’ll never kick it down.” I turned toward the voice. The man wore a black leather vest without any sort of shirt underneath, and sadly, he didn’t have the build to pull it off. His physique, on too clear a display, managed to be both scrawny and soft. He had a cattle-ring piercing in his nose. He was balding but the little hair he had left was done up in what might be called a comb-over Mohawk. I placed his age at early fifties. It looked like he had gone out to a gay bar in 1979 and had just gotten home. “Do you know the Contuzzis?” I asked. The man smiled. I expected another dental nightmare, but while the rest of him might be in various stages of decay, his teeth were gleaming. “Ah,” he said. “You’re an American.” “Yes.” “Friends with Mario, are we?” No reason to go into a long answer here: “Yes.” “Well, what can I tell you, mate? Normally they’re a quiet couple, but you know what they say—when the wife’s away, the mouse will play.

May I offer another scenario?” “Shoot.” “Terese Collins murdered her ex-husband,” Berleand said. “She needed a way to dispose of the body—someone she could trust to help clean up the mess. She called you.” I frowned. “And when I answered, she said, ‘I just killed my ex-husband in Paris, please help me’? ” “Well, she might have just told you to fly here. She might have told you the purpose after you arrived.” I smiled. This had gone on long enough. “You know she didn’t tell me that.” “How would I know that?” “You were listening in,” I said. Berleand didn’t face me then. He just kept smoking the cigarette and looked out at the view. “When you stopped me at the airport,” I continued, “you put a bug on me somewhere. My shoes maybe. Probably my cell phone.” It was the only thing that made sense. They found the body, maybe checked Rick Collins’s cell phone or whatever, found out his ex-wife was in town, put a tap on her phone, saw that she called me, held me up at the airport long enough to put on a bug and start surveillance. That was why I had been so forthcoming with Berleand—he already knew all these answers. I’d been hoping to win his trust. “Your cell phone,” he answered. “We replaced the battery with a listening device that holds the same charge. It’s very new technology, quite cutting edge.” “So you know Terese thought her ex was missing.” He tilted his head back and forth. “We know that’s what she told you.” “Come on, Berleand. You heard her tone. She was genuinely distraught.” “She seemed to be,” he agreed.

My favourite quotes, Part Two -- from Michael Connelly's "Harry Bosch" series The Black Box On Bosch’s first call to Henrik, the twin brother of Anneke - Henrik: "I am happy to talk now. Please, go ahead.” “Thank you. I, uh, first want to say as I said in my email that the investigation of your sister’s death is high priority. I am actively working on it. Though it was twenty years ago, I’m sure your sister’s death is something that hurts till this day. I’m sorry for your loss.” “Thank you, Detective. She was very beautiful and very excited about things. I miss her very much.” “I’m sure you do.” Over the years, Bosch had talked to many people who had lost loved ones to violence. There were too many to count but it never got any easier and his empathy never withered. The Burning Room 2 Grace was a young saxophonist with a powerful sound. She also sang. The song was “Somewhere Over the Rainbow,” and she produced a sound from the horn that no human voice could ever touch. It was plaintive and sad but it came with an undeniable wave of underlying hope. It made Bosch think that there was still a chance for him, that he could still find whatever it was he was looking for, no matter how short his time was. ---------------- He grabbed his briefcase off his chair and walked toward the exit door. Before he got there, he heard someone clapping behind him. He turned back and saw it was Soto, standing by her desk. Soon Tim Marcia rose up from his cubicle and started to clap. Then Mitzi Roberts did the same and then the other detectives. Bosch put his back against the door, ready to push through. He nodded his thanks and held his fist up at chest level and shook it. He then went through the door and was gone. The Burning Room 3 “What do you want to know, Bosch?” Harry nodded. His instinct was right. The good ones all had that hollow space inside. The empty place where the fire always burns. For something. Call it justice. Call it the need to know. Call it the need to believe that those who are evil will not remain hidden in darkness forever. At the end of the day Rodriguez was a good cop and he wanted what Bosch wanted. He could not remain angry and mute if it might cost Orlando Merced his due. ------------ “I have waited twenty years for this phone call . . . and all this time I thought it would go away. I knew I would always be sad for my sister. But I thought the other would go away.” “What is the other, Henrik?” Though he knew the answer. “Anger . . . I am still angry, Detective Bosch.” Bosch nodded. He looked down at his desk, at the photos of all the victims under the glass top. Cases and faces. His eyes moved from the photo of Anneke Jespersen to some of the others. The ones he had not yet spoken for. “So am I, Henrik,” he said. “So am I.” Angle of Investigation 1972 They were heading south on Vermont through territory unfamiliar to him. It was only his second day with Eckersly and his second on the job. Now He knew that passion was a key element in any investigation. Passion was the fuel that kept his fire burning. So he purposely sought the personal connection or, short of that, the personal outrage in every case. It kept him locked in and focused. But it wasn’t the Laura syndrome. It wasn’t the same as falling in love with a dead woman. By no means was Bosch in love with June Wilkins. He was in love with the idea of reaching back across time and catching the man who had killed her. The Scarecrow At one time the newsroom was the best place in the world to work. A bustling place of camaraderie, competition, gossip, cynical wit and humor, it was at the crossroads of ideas and debate. It produced stories and pages that were vibrant and intelligent, that set the agenda for what was discussed and considered important in a city as diverse and exciting as Los Angeles.

John laughed as he saw the scolding look on Roger’s face. “What?” The big man just shook his head, arms crossed. “You’re in for it now. What if you have two girls?” John scowled. That had occurred to him as well. Two boys would be ideal. He could deal with boys. What the hell would he do with girls? Chad punched Roger in the shoulder. “Hey, now. Girls are fine. Mercy is amazing.” He looked at John. “Don’t give in to all that stereotypical bullshit. She plays with cars and stuffed animals. Give her a Barbie doll and she turns her nose up at it. I can’t wait to take her shooting at the ranch. I found this awesome little .22 caliber rifle called a Cricket. Shorter barrel, shorter stock. Totally made for a little girl.” John looked at the picture Chad had saved on his phone of the little pink gun. Huh…okay. That was pretty cute. “Besides,” Chad continued, “I doubt Shannon will let you avoid them. Twins are a lot of work, my friend. I used to babysit my niece Grace when she was a baby, and just one kid is a handful. I can’t imagine two.” “Thanks for the pep talk, Lowell,” John growled. They

Don’t think about the past visits. You have cupcakes,” Julia said as if they were a magic cure-all, and then whispered, “Bye.” Before she disconnected, he heard her say in that over-the-top excited voice of hers, “Just my dad. He misses me. No, it’s—” “Happy Thanksgiving, Sheriff Landon. Chief Benson here. You might not remember me but we met last time you were in town.” Aidan was about to disconnect but the chief would probably think the call had dropped and hit redial. Thanks to Julia, Aidan was damned if he did and damned if he didn’t. If he lost his job because of her . . . He made a noncommittal sound into the phone. The chief seemed to buy it. “I just want you to know that you don’t have to worry about your little girl. I’m taking really good care of her.” Okay, how does Benson not get weirded out talking to a guy who is probably just a couple years older than him about his daughter? Aidan frowned. Wait a minute. Julia distinctly told him she wasn’t the chief’s girlfriend. So what was going on here? Maybe Benson didn’t get that no meant no. Aidan cleared his throat, deepened his voice and added what he thought of as Texan swagger. “Don’t you worry none about my daughter. She’s a bit of a thing and young, but she can take care of herself. She doesn’t need another daddy.” The chief didn’t respond. Aidan heard him talking to Julia, but their voices were muffled. And then they were unmuffled, and he clearly heard the chief say, “What do you mean it’s Aidan Gallagher and not your father?” He groaned, feeling like an idiot. He was going to kill her. “Gallagher, is that you?” the chief gritted out. Aidan pressed his forehead against the steering wheel, and the horn blasted, drowning out his yes. “My office tomorrow morning. Nine sharp.” He didn’t get a chance to respond. The line went dead. Seconds later, it came alive. I’ll fix it. I promise. She was lucky she didn’t add a happy face.

Lost When my exit came, I left the highway and soon locked the front door behind me as I breathed in the familiar scent of home. I knew I would have a scary story for my parents in the morning, and I knew a cell phone would soon be coming my way. And I will always wonder…Did I see an angel? -Jenny Snow

I love the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team for many reasons and they have given me some wonderful memories. When I look back, I don't think about the games they lost but I remember going to see the games when I was a little boy with my grandfather. I remember talking to my mom on the phone after the Cardinals won the World Series in 2006 while I was dressed up in my Captain of the Fallopian Swim Team Halloween costume. I remember taking my lovely wife to her first Cardinals game where she broke out in hives due to the heat and humidity. I remember the joy I felt as I sat with my little man watching our first Cardinals game together at Busch Stadium. I know I need to take my obsession down a notch but in the end it is worth it because it takes me back to times I will never forget and always cherish.

Abby could have landed the Pungent Barrel account if you guys hadn’t undersold her as a doghouse designer.” He could almost hear Marc flipping him the bird through the phone because he knew Tanner was right. They’d screwed up. Big-time. And Abby had lost out. “We’re considering calling Gabe, asking him to come home early and help deal with this whole Richard shitstorm,” Marc said, referring to the eldest DeLuca brother, who was currently vacationing in Italy with his wife and three daughters. “We as in you, Nate, and Trey?” Were they serious? “Because I guarantee you, there is no way Abby would agree to that. Bringing Gabe and his family back just in time for little Holly to see a naked statue of her father sounds like a complication Abby would want to avoid.” Richard hadn’t just slept with his interns—he’d gotten one pregnant, then abandoned her. By some weird twist of fate, Richard’s mistress, Regan, was now married to Gabe, making Richard’s love child Abby’s niece. And the rest of them one big, happy family. “Dick is still in her yard?” “Until Sunday.” “Sunday! That’s a long time to keep this from my nonna. Because if he’s still here when she gets home from her bachelorette party, all hell will break loose.” ChiChi had recently ended a sixty-year feud with their family’s biggest rival, Charles Baudouin, and the two were now planning a wedding, an event that ChiChi and her geriatric

I suggest you stand slowly and walk out with my men,” Zrakovi said, tapping a napkin against his lying, two-faced mouth and putting a twenty on the table to cover the drinks. “If you make a scene, innocent humans will be injured. I have a Blue Congress cleanup team in place, however, so if you want to fight in public and damage a few humans, knock yourself out. It will only add to your list of crimes.” I stood slowly, gritting my teeth when Squirrel Chin patted me down while feeling me up and making it look like a romantic moment. He’d been so busy feeling the naughty bits that he missed both Charlie, sitting in my bag next to my foot, and the dagger attached to my inner forearm. Idiot. Alex would never have been so sloppy. If Alex had patted me down, he’d have found not only the weapons but also the portable magic kit. From the corner of my eye, I saw a tourist taking mobile phone shots of us. He’d no doubt email them to all his friends back home with stories of those crazy New Orleanians and their public displays of affection. I considered pretending to faint, but I was too badly outnumbered for it to work. Like my friend Jean Lafitte, whose help I could use about now, I didn’t want to try something unless it had a reasonable chance at succeeding. I also didn’t want to pull Charlie out and risk humans getting hurt. “Walk out the door onto Chartres and turn straight toward the cathedral.” Zrakovi pulled his jacket aside enough for me to see a shoulder holster. I hadn’t even known the man could hold a gun, although for all I knew about guns it could be a water pistol. The walk to the cathedral transport was three very long city blocks. My best escape opportunity would be near Jackson Square. When the muscular goons tried to turn me left toward the cathedral, I’d try to break and run right toward the river, where I could get lost among the wharves and docks long enough to draw and power a transport. Of course in order to run, I’d have to get away from the clinch of Dreadlocks and Squirrel Chin. Charlie could take care of that. I slipped the messenger bag over my head slowly, and not even Zrakovi noticed the stick of wood protruding from the top by a couple of inches. Not to be redundant, but . . . idiots. None of us spoke as we proceeded down Chartres Street, where, to our south, the clouds continued to build. The wind had grown stronger and drier. The hurricane was sucking all the humidity out of the air, all the better to gain intensity. I hoped Zrakovi, a Bostonian, would enjoy his first storm. I hoped a live oak landed on his head.

You were right, you know—coming here was completely crazy. It was irrational. To think I’d choose to go to a town where there’s no mall, much less a day spa, and one restaurant that doesn’t have a menu? Please. No medical technology, ambulance service or local police—how is it I thought that would be easier, less stressful? I almost slid off the mountain on my way into town!” “Ah… Mel…” “We don’t even have cable, no cell phone signal most of the time. And there’s not a single person here who can admire my Cole Haan boots which, by the way, are starting to look like crap from traipsing around forests and farms. Did you know that any critical illness or injury has to be airlifted out of here? A person would be crazy to find this relaxing. Renewing.” She laughed. “The state I was in, when I was leaving L.A., I thought I absolutely had to escape all the challenges. It never occurred to me that challenge would be good for me. A completely new challenge.” “Mel…” “When I told Jack I was pregnant, after promising him I had the birth control taken care of, he should have said, ‘I’m outta here, babe.’ But you know what he said? He said, ‘I have to have you and the baby in my life, and if you can’t stay here, I’ll go anywhere.’” She sniffed a little and a tear rolled down her cheek. “When I wake up in the morning, the first thing I do is check to see if there are deer in the yard. Then I wonder what Preacher’s in the mood to fix for dinner. Jack’s usually already gone back to town—he likes splitting logs in the early morning—half the town wakes up to the sound of his ax striking wood. I see him five or ten times through the day and he always looks at me like we’ve been apart for a year. If I have a patient in labor, he stays up all night, just in case I need something. And when there are no patients at night, when he holds me before I fall asleep, bad TV reception is the last thing on my mind. “Am I staying here? I came here because I believed I’d lost everything that mattered, and ended up finding everything I’ve ever wanted in the world. Yeah, Joey. I’m staying. Jack’s here. Besides, I belong here now. I belong to them. They belong to me.” *

Shopping Dana Gioia I enter the temple of my people but do not pray. I pass the altars of the gods but do not kneel Or offer sacrifices proper to the season. Strolling the hushed aisles of the department store, I see visions shining under glass, Divinities of leather, gold, and porcelain, Shrines of cut crystal, stainless steel, and silicon. But I wander the arcades of abundance, Empty of desire, no credit to my people, Envying the acolytes their passionate faith. Blessed are the acquisitive, For theirs is the kingdom of commerce. Redeem me, gods of the mall and marketplace. Mercury, protector of cell phones and fax machines, Venus, patroness of bath and bedroom chains, Tantalus, guardian of the food court. Beguile me with the aromas of coffee, musk, and cinnamon. Surround me with delicately colored soaps and moisturizing creams. Comfort me with posters of children with perfect smiles And pouting teenage models clad in lingerie. I am not made of stone. Show me satins, linen, crepe de chine, and silk, Heaped like cumuli in the morning sky, As if all caravans and argosies ended in this parking lot To fill these stockrooms and loading docks. Sing me the hymns of no cash down and the installment plan, Of custom fit, remote control, and priced to move. Whisper the blessing of Egyptian cotton, polyester, and cashmere. Tell me in what department my desire shall be found. Because I would buy happiness if I could find it, Spend all that I possessed or could borrow. But what can I bring you from these sad emporia? Where in this splendid clutter Shall I discover the one true thing? Nothing to carry, I should stroll easily Among the crowded countertops and eager cashiers, Bypassing the sullen lines and footsore customers, Spending only my time, discounting all I see. Instead I look for you among the pressing crowds, But they know nothing of you, turning away, Carrying their brightly packaged burdens. There is no angel among the vending stalls and signage. Where are you, my fugitive? Without you There is nothing but the getting and the spending Of things that have a price. Why else have I stalked the leased arcades Searching the kiosks and the cash machines? Where are you, my errant soul and innermost companion? Are you outside amid the potted palm trees, Bumming a cigarette or joking with the guards, Or are you wandering the parking lot Lost among the rows of Subarus and Audis? Or is it you I catch a sudden glimpse of Smiling behind the greasy window of the bus As it disappears into the evening rush?

It hits me. I love that woman. So fucking much. And I’m the biggest idiot on the planet for not begging for her forgiveness the other night. Yes, I’ve been freaked out about football and what’s going to happen with my career. Yes, I’ve been sleep-deprived and worried sick, but above all that noise, the truth levels me: if I get the game back, but she walks out of my life, it’ll wreck me. I swallow. Hard. How the hell am I gonna make it right between us again? I’ve been a mess all week. When my dad called to bitch me out yesterday, I lost it. At first, I hoped he’d called to support me, to say something fucking fatherly for once. To offer some advice. But no, he just wanted to rub my face in the scandal and call me a dumbass for getting serious with Gabby. I snapped, yelled shit I knew he wanted to hear just to get him off the phone, but it rattled me. How could someone who supposedly loved me believe the worst about me? Of course, if Gabby really thinks you’re fucking someone else behind her back, maybe you are the dumbass your father claims you are for falling for her when you should have your eyes on the prize and your heart on the game. Not on your neighbor who may want to rip your balls from your body.

I AM A “LET GROW” KID! Hi! My name is _______________ I am not lost or neglected. I have been taught how to cross the street. I know never to go off with strangers . . . but I can talk to them. (Including you!) The state allows parents to decide at what age their child can do some things independently. Mine believe it is safe, healthy and fun for me to explore my neighborhood. If you do not believe me, please call or text them at the numbers below. If you still think it is inappropriate or illegal for me to be on my own, please: Read Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Remember your own childhood! Were you under adult supervision at every moment? Today’s crime rate is back to what it was in 1963, so it’s safer to play outside NOW than when you were my age. Visit the website LetGrow.org. Parent’s Name _______________ Parent’s Signature _______________ Parent’s Phone _______________ Alternate Phone _______________

I've been driving on the fine line between ultimate freedom and complete and utter loneliness. Some nights, if I'm too tired to drive, I pull over on the side of the road and watch the shooting stars from my sunroof until I fall asleep. My phone doesn't have service out here, so I often only have the compass app to navigate. I get lost time and time again, but somehow I end up exactly where I need to be.

Ignoring my pain to hold a conversation is exhausting. I may have put on a fake smile all day at work, so when you ask me to hang out, the answer might be no. I might just want to curl up in a blanket and forget how to be a person for a while. My relationships suffer. I have lost a lot of friends because I am no longer able to keep in touch. For those who think texting is not good enough, it might be all we have. If I am unable to get out of bed, at least I braved the brightness of my phone screen and the stabbing pains in the back of my head it will cause to let you know that I’m thinking of you.

I try to imagine Zach as a teenager. I remember my mom dealing with me as a teenager and finding me as alien as I might one day find Zach. It seems not that long ago that he was in preschool, and my parents were healthy, and I was healthy, and the neighborhood kids all ran outside to play every evening after dinner, and the only thought I had about the future at all was the sense of Things will be easier, I’ll have more flexibility, more sleep. I never thought about what would be lost. Who knew that a phone call with my mother could bring all this to the surface—that underneath the old mother-daughter frustration was not a wish for her to go away but a longing for her to stay forever? I think of something else Wendell once said: “The nature of life is change and the nature of people is to resist change.” It was a paraphrase of something he’d read that had resonated with him both personally and as a therapist, he told me, because it was a theme that informed nearly every person’s struggles. The day before he said this, I had been told by my eye doctor that I had developed presbyopia, which happens to most people in their forties. As people age, they become farsighted; they have to hold whatever they’re reading or looking at farther away in order to see it clearly. But maybe an emotional presbyopia happens around this age too, where people pull back to see the bigger picture: how scared they are to lose what they have, even if they still complain about it.

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I am absolutely heart broken. All my life energy completely sucked out. It is too painful to be awake. I love you. I really do. And it hurts so bad to not be able to share it or feel it. I needed a memory with you. I've had a bloody year full of isolation and loss. Lost contact with most of my extended family. Lost any chance of seeing old friends and hanging out with my coolest cousin. Why? For one, some guy planted the seed that I've been terrorizing women. It would all be worth it if I had just one day with you. I hit the sky whenever I think you're coming. This several times now. But then you never show and I crater into the dirt. I don't know what you know. Why do you think I've been trying to get in contact? I didn't even know for sure you were here. It is unthinkable to make that distance and not ask for help. There are phones everywhere. There are pay phones. There are stores with helpful employees. I spent nearly 24 hours, pacing between my PC and the porch, looking out for you. I showed you I have the money. I told you I have the money. I've done so many times. I went to you for help last year during a critical point. I was doing ok then. I'm not well now. I don't know what's real anymore. My brains turned to mush. I've not been eating. Don't know what to do anymore.

I'm sorry you lost your friends.' 'I'm sorry you lost yours.' Bryce nodded her thanks, going back to stirring. 'I know people don't get it. It's just... a light went out inside me when it happened. Danika wasn't my sister, or my lover. But she was the one person I could be myself around and never feel judged. The one person that I knew would always pick up the phone, or call me back. She was the one person who made me feel brave because no matter what happened, no matter how bad or embarrassing or shitty it was, I knew that I had her in my corner. That if it all went to Hel, I could talk to her and it would be fine.' Her eyes gleamed, and it was all he could do to not cross the few feet between them and grab her hand as she continued. 'But it... I'm not fine. I will never talk to her again. I think people expect me to be over it by now. But I can't. Anytime I get anywhere close to the truth of my new reality, I want to space out again. To not have to be me. I can't fucking dance anymore because it reminds me of her- of all the dancing we did together in clubs or on the streets or in our apartment or dorm. I won't let myself dance anymore because it brought me joy, and... And I didn't, I don't, want to feel those things.' She swallowed. 'I know it sounds pathetic.' 'It's not,' he said quietly. 'I'm sorry I dumped my baggage in your lap.' A corner of his mouth turned up. 'You can dump your baggage in my lap anytime, Quinlan.' She snorted, shaking her head. 'You made it sound gross.' 'You said it first.

FOCUS is one of the most valuable skills in business, and is becoming increasingly rare. If you can master this skill, you’ll achieve extraordinary results and make more money than most people. In his book, "Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success In a Distracted World", Cal Newport says: “Deep work is the ability to focus without distraction on a cognitively demanding task. It’s a skill that allows you to quickly master complicated information and produce better results in less time. Deep work will make you better at what you do and provide the sense of true fulfillment that comes from craftsmanship. In short, deep work is like a super power in our increasingly competitive twenty-first century economy. And yet, most people have lost the ability to go deep – spending their days instead in a frantic blur of email and social media, not even realizing there’s a better way.” When I started writing a book a month, I have to admit, it was challenging. I quickly realized I had a focus problem. Coincidentally, I attended a book festival and picked up a book by Catherine Price, "How to Break Up With Your Phone", and discovered my life was being sucked away one text message, one social media post, and one email at a time. If I wanted to write a book a month, I needed to get my life and my time back. I read Catherine’s book, and the following especially resonated with me: “Today, just over a decade since smartphones entered our lives, we’re beginning to suspect that their impact on our lives might not be entirely good. We feel busy but ineffective… The same technology that gives us freedom can also act like a leash—and the more tethered we become, the more it raises the question of who’s actually in control.” I had lost control of my time and my ability to focus. It wasn’t an overnight event, it was a slow, insidious change that happened over a long period of time. Below are some other interesting statistics from Price’s book: Americans check their phones 47 times per day.

Atticus: I've been working there four fucking weeks! I'm going to be eating ramen noodles for the rest of my life. Asher: Never tried them. Atticus: Dude, fucking disgusting. Trust me. Asher: Matilda's making roast au jus for dinner tonight with those homemade Yorkshire puddings you like. Atticus: I hate you. Loathe. Despise. Basically every synonym for hate there is. Asher: Call me? My phone rang a minute later, and I whined long and loud into the receiver in place of saying hello. I'd been accused of being overly dramatic in the past. There might be some truth behind it. Asher chuckled. "You're pathetic." "Why have you not run away with me? We've been separated. I can't stand it. It's like the individual cells in my body are trying to divide again and make another you. It hurts. I can't do it twice." I whimpered again for emphasis. "Ash, I'm screwed, and not in the bend me over the hood of the Jag and pound my ass type of way. The bad way. The painful way. The oh-crap-my-bank-account-is-in-the-negative way. I'm fast running out of ideas, and you're over there living the high life and eating roast au jus with my goddamn Yorkshire puddings." "I get the sense you're trying to tell me something, but whatever it is, it's getting lost in translation. You're rambling. What's going on? Speak-a the English. What's the problem?" "What isn't the problem? I'm poor and miserable. I was not ready for adulthood this soon. Tell Mom and Dad it was all lies. It was a phase. I'm over it. Ha, good joke, right?" "Riiight, and how do you propose I magically make the burned image of your mouth around Ryan Vector's cock disappear from Matilda's mind?" "Fuck. You know what? We don't need a housekeeper. Fire her ass! Tell Mom and Dad she's a big fat liar who lies and hates me. Tell them she's stealing from them. She's an illegal immigrant! No, tell them, she's a housekeeper by day and a hooker by night. I saw her walking the streets of Fifth Avenue after sundown in a mini skirt and fishnet stockings." I paused, envisioning our sixty-year-old housekeeper/used-to-be-nanny in that kind of attire. Asher and I both audibly ewwed at the exact same time. "Dude, that's fucking gross as shit, and you know it. I just threw up in my mouth. Why would you put that image in my head?" "I regret many of my life decisions. Add it to the list. Ash, I'm serious. Just make something up. Get rid of her. We don't need a housekeeper, and we're long past requiring a nanny. Especially one who walks into rooms without knocking. What was she thinking?" "The door wasn't closed." "Not the time, Ash!" "Okay, so let's pretend for five minutes Matilda dies in a horrible car crash." "We could make that happen.