Friendship is a strange animal. It only thrives in voluntary enjoyment of each other's company, in the pleasure of nonobligatory connection. I repeat: You owe me nothing.

My sudden, unforeseen capitulation had knocked me backward, and I had nothing to hold on to. My internal weather was eerily calm, as if in a tornado's aftermath, birdsong, sunshine, supersaturated colors, wreckage all around, and myself, dazed and limping.

Let nothing human be foreign to me

Everything that has ever happened to me is still all with me.

It happened every single day in Brooklyn: awaken to fresh glory, fall asleep to blight and ruin.