A porcelain doll in a broken ship sinks in the cold sea that warms towards us. If we find it whole ashore, it is a doll. If we find it broken, but entire, we will probably make a doll again out of the parts. But it was a doll before its time in the sea, and surely it is more interesting afterwards. So we lay out the parts as parts, from torso to shard, and let them be the story of their separation, but then this is not a story of a doll. Only when we stop finding doll parts do we think to stand on an empty shore and let the water alone tell us the story of all the dolls, and all the ships, and the sea and how we wait on the edge of it for what it brings us.

Because it is not necessary to recapitulate an entire revolution in every individual action, a palace may be made of any material, in the image of any belief. Arguably the purest are built to admit you to a space, not shelter you from it. And so some of the most beautiful noises may sing the feeling of quiet, and some of the lineages of reduction return us to grandeur renewed.

The perfect sugar high is the quintessential impulse of human chemistry.

The trick of waking up tomorrow, instead of always today, is learning how to hurt without forgetting how to play.

The shortest distances are sometimes the hardest to find the will to cross.

The hero takes a journey, or a stranger comes to town. But these are too often distractions for the vicarious and incurious, or implicit affirmations for the complacent and selfish. The real story is that no physical place is ever foreign to itself, but people can pretend.

If we cannot change the spin of the earth to shorten the night, at least we can think of a use for the dark.

Imperialism assumes that the hierarchy of mistakes is governed by seniority. Tourism imagines that the observed are not acted upon, or if so that they can be cheaply re-taught themselves as roles. But resonance and listening are each other's gifts and each other's rewards.

Mountains rise and fall for their own reasons, and we are strewn among them dreaming of how they would be moved by our hearts.

And sometimes it's the hardest and the easiest thing in the world to cut your hair.

The moon hangs there, empty of people and full of hope, over the years after we escaped the wraths of the old gods, but before we learned to become the new ones.

It is possible to listen to music without falling in love a thousand times an hour, year after year. It is possible to fall in love a million times without trying to list them. But what if someone gave up on falling in love one line or an hour before you?

What if the last sounds we heard were the sighs before these, before sadness reached its center?

If we need silence, there is more than enough between the notes.

If we need wars, we have our own principles to misconstrue.

We have guitars.

We have all the things we dare each other to do without.

We have the stabs of displaced epiphany when we can back our doubts into evil.

We have the seizures of wonder when we discover the limits of our powerlessness.

And we have everything we've ever had the sense to finally and fitfully let go.