Somewhere, excitement waited for me like an uncut cake.

I didn't tell him that I'd put his awful stories in boxes and stacked them on a shelf at the back of my mind. I could hear a quieter version of them still, from their dark place, through all the other business that occupied my brain, but I wouldn't unlid those boxes until I was ready to hear [his] stories again as they wanted to be heard.

Anyone who's ever gone from warm and bright to cold and dark knows how I felt.

All around us, birds woke up the sky.

But the wind always swept my words away like cloud shadows, as if it mattered more that I said them, than who heard them.

If my life was to be just a single note in an endless symphony, how could I not sound it out for as long and as loudly as I could?

I slept so long and hard that when my mother woke me the next morning I was a stranger to myself.

And that's when I felt the first wave of sorrow that came from keeping a new secret.