“When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much. A calendar that showed the wrong month. I could have cried over it. I did. Where the smoke from a chimney ended. How an overturned bottle rested at the edge of a table.I spent my life learning to feel less.Every day I felt less.Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.”