Being An Outsider Is The One Thing

In The Darkest Hour Of Winter, When The Starlings Had All Flown Away, Gretel Samuelson Fell In Love. It Happened The Way Things Are Never Supposed To Happen In Real Life, Like A Sledgehammer, Like A Bolt From Out Of The Blue. One Minute She Was A Seventeen Year-old Senior In High School Waiting For A Sicilian Pizza To Go; The Next One She Was Someone Whose Whole World Had Exploded, Leaving Her Adrift In The Milky Way, So Far From Earth She Was Walking On Stars.

You Build Your World Around Someone, And Then What Happens When He Disappears? Where Do You Go-into Pieces, Into Atoms, Into The Arms Of Another Man? You Go Shopping, You Cook Dinner, You Work Odd Hours, You Make Love To Someone Else On June Nights. But You're Not Really There.

Cleaning Up After Themselves Was A Low Priority For Margo And My Mother. They Had Both Recovered From Cancer Scares, Failed Marriages, And Lost Hope; In Their Opinion, Dirt Could Wait.

I Think We Are Bound To, And By, Nature. We May Want To Deny This Connection And Try To Believe We Control The External World, But Every Time There's A Snowstorm Or Drought, We Know Our Fate Is Tied To The World Around Us

Sometimes Words Drew Blood, They Cut Your Tongue, They Made You Know Things You Couldn't Unknow.