everyone in me is a bird

And I have found both freedom and safety in my madness; the freedom of loneliness and the safety from being understood, for those who understand us enslave something in us.

How does one get across the fact that the best way to find out how people feel about their gender or their sexuality -- or anything else, really -- is to listen to what they tell you, and to try to treat them accordingly, without shellacking over their version of reality with yours?

This is suffering's lesson: pay attention. The important part might come to you in a form you do not recognize.

Wounds, I think, are never confined to a single skin but reach out to rasp us all. When you die, there's that much less breath to the world, and across continents someone supposedly separate gasps for air.