She expected a lot of me. When I was in fourth grade working on a book report, she made me start the whole thing over when she read it and said it was barely even legible. "What's wrong with it?" I asked her. "It's not good enough yet. You have to try harder," she said, her voice gentle. "You have to try hard at everything you do. That's all I ask." I rolled my eyes and revised it, and over time her approach wore off on me and I became like her too - wanting to do my best, expecting my best.

This is what I'm supposed to be doing this summer. This is how I'm supposed to be passing my days. Figuring out the secret to how she was the most joyful person when she was dying. Because I'm living, and I sure as hell don't have a clue how to feel anything but empty.

When someone you love has died, there is a certain grace period during which you can get away with murder. Not literal murder, but pretty much anything else.

Do you need anything?" she asks. A mom A dad. Someone. Anyone. Can you arrange for that? "Nah, I'm good.

Get away from my house and all its rooms that echo, all the rooms I don't enter anymore.

I don't tell her that my grasp on truth, on words, on people, has slipped. I was getting close, so close to normal again, and that's been snatched away. I'm not even back where I started. I'm somewhere else entirely, so far off the map I don't know where to turn next.

I am no longer the left behind. I am the living. And I want everything this life has to offer. I stop for a second and look around at all the shops and stores and stalls. At all the people, going about their days, at all the moments they're living. This is what I want. I want to live every moment. I want to feel everything.

Why she was the happy one when she was dying, and I just can't seem to manage anything when I'm living.

Because I'm living, and I sure as hell don't have a clue how to feel anything but empty.

Another deserted sentence. Another side effect of death. Words go AWOL.

And we're all good, everything is forgiven between Beethoven and me because this is the part of me that hasn't changed. In this monent I'm not defined by the other things, the things that happened to me, the things I didn't choose. This is the part of me that defines me for all time, for always. The thing I choose completely.

My mom was there to answer the unanswerable, to make sense of the fault in our life - and we got through that somehow; we came out on the other side. Now I'm 0 for 2 and I don't get any more pitches to swing at.

No, I am not all right, I want to say. Have you been to my house? Have you seen how empty it is?

Sometimes, when we are sad, we have to do the opposite of sad. Sometimes we have to sing.

You’re not the same. You’re not supposed to be the same. You’re supposed to be different. This isn’t something you will ever forget.

…if you have someone who wants to heal, sometime they will respond to the unconventional. Their minds are more open to healing, so their bodies become more willing too. I believe that medication, while a wonderful thing, has its limits. That there are answers to be found in the unconventional.

We are what we love. We are the things, the people, the ideas we spend our days with. They center us, they drive us, they define us to our very core.Without them, we are empty.

I don't need to be any place else, because the music takes me to the only place I want to be right now. To the place where I am and have always been wholly me, the only church I've ever belonged to, the only place I've ever prayed.

Because maybe it's in the stories that the people we love are still alive.

Because this is what I believe - that second chances are stronger than secrets. You can let secrets go. But a second chance? You don't let that pass you by.

But I am tired of everyone being gone, and I am tired of everything that has tired me out for the last five years of my life.

But I don't feel like dealing because dealing requires too much energy, and energy is what I lack.

[Referring to rape] It already is bigger than everything else. It lives in front of me, behind me, next to me, inside me every single day. My schedule is dictated by it, my habits by it, my music by it.

Why am I doing this? Because it feels so good to talk like we used to, even though I know this is just a shadow of what we had. But I chase it anyway.

Nothing is ever enough.