Venice was a contrast from Los Angeles itself, where you might see a woman with $15,000 tits, a face frozen in place by Botox, wobbling with her $4,000 Gucci bag right past a child with a sunken belly and exposed ribs encaging a heart too weak to scream.

In the lowest of lows you can learn the highest of highs, and that often when you get to the point of wanting to die, it’s because you already have and are truly aching to live.

It felt important to be able to pick up and go whenever this endless stirring and inevitable craving for a change of scenery would bubble over because I didn’t want to die someday yearning for something else when it was only “something else” worth living.

Moreover, we were to each other aspects of a dream unrealized. I emblemized the excitement of freedom, a life untethered by the confines of constructs. She illustrated a sense of belonging, of ongoing laughter in the face of those constructs, a true lifeline within the walking dead. We were standing in different places, yet the same, seeing within each other a sense of truth within the lies, a radiant light that illuminated the dark.