Clearly God was in some kind of mood on my birthday.

I look for places like me: big, hollow, forgotten by almost everyone.

I told myself that if I didn't care, this wouldn't have hurt so much - surely that proved I was alive and human and all those touchy-feely things, for once and for all. But that wasn't a relief, not when I felt like a skyscraper with dynamite on every floor.

You know, he told me once, completely exasperated, you've got one glass of water inside your head, with all the tears for a lifetime. If you waste them over nothing, then you won't be able to cry for real when you need to.

He's lighter than you'd think, like whatever was inside him was used up long ago.With that reasoning, it's a wonder I don't float off into the sky.

I [Jacob Hunt, Aspie] see it as the next step of evolution: I cannot take away your sadness, so why should I acknowledge it?

How could she trust this man, so imprecise with his words, to take care of the burial? To say there had been a loss was ludicrous; one lost a shoe or a pair of keys. You did not suffer the death of a child and say there was a loss. There was a catastrophe. A devastation. A hell.