Every heart needed to contain stories that were too overwhelming to reveal to another human being, for fear that sharing them would diminish their enormity.

We could love, I realized, without the promise of exclusivity that one had been raised on. And there was no shame or guilt in that, it was just the way the human heart was, four-chambered, with an infinite capacity to contain others, more than it could contain itself.

Every heart needed to contain stories that were too overwhelming to reveal to another human being.

Miss was a word that couldn’t quite express the hollow pit of my stomach filled with nothing but cold gusts of air where the intestines should have been, walking around with a gaping hole in my chest where my heart had been pulled out from, feeling hollow within and without. It was a missing that filled me up, an absence that was a presence, a bereavement that wasn’t a release.