Flute Boy Doug fell out the window and died last Tuesday, and I was drinking milk. He was the kind of person that couldn't pronounce salmon the right way, and said museum, muse-ay-um. Doug was my best friend and I hated him. Doug was my closest confidant and all I told him were lies. No one understands, but Doug was exactly the kind of person that fell out of windows. We had band class together. He played the flute. What kind of boy plays the flute? The Doug kind I guess, the kind that doesn't know blowing flutes is like the dirty kind of other blowing. We had band class and every time Mr. Harlow called Doug's name during attendance, he never responded. He would sit in the front row with his music stand up, tuning his flute, listening to himself play a G note, until the kid next to him elbowed him in the ribs. That was exactly who he was, the boy that played a flute and never listened during attendance. Maybe that doesn't mean anything to you, but to me that means the world. Doug fell out the window last Tuesday thinking I was his best friend in the whole world, and all I did was sit at the kitchen table and drink milk.

Thoughts Some people live #life like it's an experiment. As though it is something to be played with and manipulated without any resulting consequence. Some drugs here, a mean joke there. An anthropologist studying human behavior rather than a person living #life. That begs the question who is the scientist in control and who are the rats? They like to think they are the scientists, in control of the changing variables with a pen at the ready to record the success or failure of the rats' attempts. But I think us humans who make #life an experiment are really the rats. We think we are in control but we are choosing one of many split paths in the maze. Circumstance has given us many choices: to go to school, to have sex, to fall into #depression, to fall in love, or to work and on and on. We are blindly going whichever way smells or looks the best and praying that we do not hit a wall. But I think #life is more like a dance. Or would rather like it to be like a dance. The more we go at it, the better we get. And the better circumstances we get for a partner determines how smoothly our dance goes. Of course everyone knows that part of dancing involves the switching of partners. It is inevitable. But the dance seems more human to me than an experiential, in the end, I guess it doesn't really matter. #life is #life and we are going to live no matter what until our hearts stop. Whether it be as rats in a maze or people out on the dance floor, I do not see much of a difference.

Crazy Night I just wanted to feel something. I wanted to feel like an animal for once rather than a reasonable person who is always stuck thinking the same sensible thoughts. Be moral, my mind says. Do what is right. Do what is good, and do it for God. And it might be the Darwinian theory twirling inside of my head that I used for an excuse but, if I'm being honest (and I have no reason not to be since you are a part of me) it was all me. I didn't need Darwin to tell me I have animalistic urges, I needed him to distance me from my god so I could become something immoral for a change. To escape the only being that has kept me sensible. The truth is, I planned out the event before they even thought it up. Before he even told me he had a bottle of vodka in the fridge (and do you even keep it refrigerated? An odd question but one that has troubled me since that night) and poured me a glass. Before I got tipsy but could not admit that I was in such a state (and what does that say about my psychology if not that it is deluded?) . Before the drug deal and the blue-green beautiful, disgusting bowl and the crushed up weed in a plastic container and the smoking and the getting-high-for-the-hell-of-it. And for what? To feel like the animal that is somewhere inside of me? Because I never want to see that thing come out again.

Her When she kissed him, she tasted like a rainy July night out in the starlit street and he wanted more. Her skin was hot against him like a breezeless mid-day at the end of August but her hair was still wet and cool as though she had soaked it in a bucket of December snow. She made his head swim with color, as though he were bathing in the dead, red Fall leaves and the deep-blue January sky. To him, she was all the time; all the seasons mixed into one. And he thanked God for her, his Christmas present in June and Fourth of July in March.

Alison's Love Story She didn't like her mother, but she was too young to know what loving someone so much it hurts feels like. She said that she loved her sister but it was a shallow love, not an oh-my-god-my-heart-is-going-to-bust love. She liked her boyfriend, but knew enough to know that it was no true love. And one night she sat up in bed and thought to herself: How will I know love when I stumble across it? How will I know what it looks like, what it feels like? But every 14 year old grows up and she did and she found her answers one day under a tall oak tree with a book in her lap when a tall, quirky looking man with shaggy brown hair and brown eyes helped an old lady across the street for no other reason than it was the right thing to do. And her love story began. And when she held her first born baby girl, she understood what her mother's love felt like and loved her. And when her little sister married, she realized that they were so much more than childhood playmates and wept by her side at the "I do". And when she was old and gray and her Jimmy with the brown hair and the brown eyes who helped old women cross the street for no other reason than to help them was lying, dying in a hospital bed, she held his hand and knew that this was true love. And it was.