It is better to listen to a crow that lives in trees than to a learned man who lives only in ideas. - Kate Horsley

I can’t help it. All those sharp little shards inside me could be answers, but they’ve come loose. Now I see them in fragments that don’t make any more sense than my nightmares do.

Those puzzle pieces are all in there somewhere. I know it.

I looked at some old photos Mom took of me and Dad for some photography project or other and tried to see if he listened to me back then, if we were close. But how can you tell? Just because people smile for photos doesn't mean they're happy.

Words came from her mouth and dispelled my loneliness, even when she was not with me...I began then to know words as immortal things one could see and touch, each having a color and shape like a pebble that never suffers disease or death. I dreamed of bags of polished pebbles; each bag a story; each bag holding one precious jewel among the many pebbles or a dark, black stone that was death's eye.