There is a middle path, but it goes in only one direction: toward the light. Your light. The one that goes blink, blink, blink inside your chest when you know what you’re doing is right. Listen to it. Trust it. Let it make you stronger than you are.

Ghastly, horrible, shocking, sad, merciless things. Things that would compel me to squint my eyes as I listened, as if by squinting I could protect myself by hearing it less distinctly.

It didn’t just get better for them. They made it better.

fulminating

desultory

And it’s a kind of love that will kill you if you let it.

What I was mulling over is how I’d get at the layers of things your letter implies to me: the questions you didn’t ask that stand so brightly behind the questions you did.

it. Doing so will free your relationship from the tense tangle that withholding weaves.

You get to define the terms of your life.