This all feels like a dream. It feels pastel, romantically rimmed with light. I can’t seal it into rows of jars in a cellar. It’s a river through my fingers.

But it’s not a circle; we’re going somewhere, all of us, together.

Healing is moving not fast. It’s taking time with things for their own sake. It’s allowing space. Attachment arrives, unannounced, through these strange subliminal things. Textures. Nuances. Angles. Tones of voice. Dust in the light.

Eight billion stories unfolding toward you. Eight billion shards of your light. And yet I walk through my life feeling like you’re curiously pleased with this one.

I’m sitting here beside the church bell tower, editing. Beside me sits a high school graduate with a pixie cut, and a 23-year-old woman who didn’t know that her life was about to change.

They both almost died from religion. They both got you wrong. They were both me.

It’s out of the overflow of the heart that the mouth speaks. What happens when the heart goes silent?