“But you...are my sweetest gift. The life surprise that soothed all my ills and gave me my greatest joys. I feel so blessed you are mine.—Mama Ya-Ya”

“The world can be a hard place sometimes... You have to have heart. You have to be strong. Parents want their children to grow up to be strong. Not just any strong, mind you, but loving strong.”

“Women hand sight down through the generations. Mother to daughter.”

“Sometimes I feel as if I'm cursed. A slow, hungry curse that has worked its way across my entire life, stripping me of everything I love.”

“Because you see..." He cradled Alec's face between his hands. "I'm in love with you, Alec. The kind of love that not only makes my balls ache, but that makes my chest so tight sometimes I think I can't breathe. The kind that makes my skin tingle and my heart pound and my knees weak whenever I'm around you. I'm deeply ... powerfully ... unequivocally in love with you.”

“My grief has burrowed into me like a dark thing that eats away at my life.”

“He walked over to the piano and lifted the cover revealing black and white keys that my fingers knew all too well. “Play for me?”I looked at the piano hesitantly and I felt the passion start to grow back inside of me. My fingers itched to play and suddenly my body was moving towards the piano and I sat down, my posture back to where it should be, my fingers hovering over the keys ready to play a song that I hadn’t heard in years.I closed my eyes and slowly breathed in and out. And then my fingers flew across the keys, the music filling the room. The music moved me both emotionally and physically as I rocked my body to the music, putting all of me into the song. The music took me to a different place than where I was here and now. This is the melody I always seem to come back to, always finding myself lost in the notes. The song is a part of me as it tells a story. A story about loss and recovery.”