I think that's what the people who change our lives always do. They give us permission to be the person we secretly really long to be but maybe don't feel we're allowed to be.

A child just wants to love her parents and to be loved, and it seems like it should be simple to do that, but sometimes it's not.

It wasn't easy to understand how the love between two other people could diminish you. If those two people were still accessible to you, if they called you all the time, if they asked you to come into the city for the weekend as you'd always done, then why should you feel, suddenly, intensely lonely?

Apparently, something can happen inside someone you love—it can just happen somehow—and like magic she thinks that she’s had enough, and that the way the two of you have been for a really long time is no longer worth the effort. Does that sound familiar to anyone.