“Back up shall we? When my brother, the crazy chicken warrior, turned into a falcon and went up the pyramid’s chimney with his new friend, the fruit bat, he left me playing nurse to two very wounded people—which I didn’t appreciate, and which I wasn’t particularly good at.”

“I’ll always be broken,” I went on. “Because when I came here, no one fixed me. It’s not that they didn’t care to fix me. These crazy, wonderful people I met at Craneville didn’t fix me because they didn’t think I needed to be fixed. And it wasn’t because they were ‘crazy’…it was because they were the only people who knew that I could only face the world out there again as someone different. As someone who wasn’t perfect, who wasn’t normal, who didn’t have all the answers…someone who was somehow ‘fixed’ by being broken.”

“I have a very dear friend, a great painter, called me up very upset, the work wasn’t going well… He asked me to come to his studio -- which I did -- I looked around at the work, dozens of sketches, drawings, large pictures, and I was very close to his work, intensely involved with his work, and he asked me, ‘What’s wrong?’ And I said, ‘Simple – it’s a loss of nerve.”

“I didn’t say anything. I just took his hand in mine, and laid it over my heart that was still pounding wildly in my chest. I wasn’t sure why I did it, or where my logic went in that particular moment. Maybe I wanted him to know that he wasn’t alone in the way he felt and that the kiss had reignited something in me, as well. I didn’t know for sure.”

“We were wearing diapers at the same time. We didn’t grow up together, however. I was in the crib, and she was playing cribbage in the nursing home.”

“It was as if we were having two different conversations. Which wasn’t that surprising after all, as we were clearly having two entirely different experiences of breaking up. His was soft, cushioned; Jude and his friends had broken his fall. Mine was cold, empty and bereft. I was freefalling in space and time, with nobody standing by to stop me hurtling headlong into obscurity.”