"Don't worry about not meeting my expectations," she wrote.
"After all, I'm the girl who gives a guy credit for wiping his own butt."

He asked her to call in the morning.
But the next day she just sat and watched the clock and waited to pick up the phone.
She was trying to figure out how he defined "morning."

As she looked at the list of names of unknown people, she thought,
"It is amazing to see the words that once lived on the pages of a small notebook on my desk travel off to so many new destinations.
I hope they find where they are going."

Yesterday he asked me why I didn't like cilantro.
"Because it tastes like Ivory soap!," I thought.
But I just shrugged my shoulders,
I knew my disliking it wasn't reason enough for him
So I stopped looking for a reason that he would understand.

He told me he went on stage naked a lot to perform
I thought he meant "bearing his soul"
But he just meant "without his clothes on."

On the inside front cover of my senior yearbook John wrote:
"Don't forget us little people."
That was 17 years ago.
Today I learned that John is missing in the gaping wound that was the World Trade Center.
Is this God's way of reminding me not to forget?
I would have preferred a string around my finger.

Maybe I'm really a tree in disguise...
I seem to like to branch out in lots of different directions.

She taught her how to skate when she was three.
"Don't move!," the child said as she braved the 4 feet of ice that separated them.
"Don't worry," she thought, "My skates may be moving, but I'm not going anywhere."

Today the California hills look like the curves of a woman lying at rest in the warm sun.

She tried to find words for how she felt, but the 10,000 languages in the world were inadequate.
She wondered, "If I could create number 10,001, what would it sound like?"

I was asked once to find the median in a list of numbers.
I said, "Choose the one on the left."
I was never very good with numbers.

She would go running in the streets and wonder if these could really be the same streets she drove on every day on her way to work.

I met a woman with a "weenie" attached to her side.
She said it kept her kidneys clean.
I knew it was there to open my eyes.

I met a man with no legs once
But he seemed to be able to take himself everywhere he needed to go.

Every time her leg moved, the cat tried to pounce on it.
I think the cat has it right -
Chase down everything that catches your fancy
Waiting is not required.

She wondered why the caps were screwed on so tight...
to keep what was inside from getting out?...
or to keep what was outside from getting in?...

While she was alive she gave her possessions to the ones she loved -
But they knew her love was the most precious gift she gave them.

"If you cannot hear these instructions, you cannot sit in an exit row. Please inform the flight attendant now."
She wondered if they themselves could hear...

Her mother used to tell her "Don't bite off more than you can chew!"
She didn't see the logic in that when the world was sitting before her on a plate.

"Would you like to come in for a minute?," he asked.
"Sure," she replied.
Three hours later she asked if she had overstayed her welcome.
"No," he said, "I meant a minute in dog years."

She stood there by the dance floor with her invisible cloaking shield on.
And yet, somehow, he still saw her.

Unaddressed issues are like strands of hair;
The split ends begin so innocently at the bottom
and work their way to the roots.

When you kayak you're taught to push the paddle away from you with your top arm rather than pull against the water with your lower one.
This propels you forward.
Seems life is like that.
Be willing to give in order to receive.

When she was 28 she made a list of things she wanted to do before she died.
At 29 she found the list, still waiting to be done.
She wondered if she was already dead.

The music spoke the language of her body - her moves, its words - a perfect song.

"When he knew he was dying, my grandfather wrote love notes and small prayers on pieces of paper and hid them around the house so that my grandmother would find them when he was gone and still know how much he loved her."

I sat in the coffee shop as he told me this story and cried.
I hoped one day a note would find me.

She stared at the bottle of RESOLVE in her hand and wondered if, with a name like that, it could work on her life as well as on her carpet.
Just spray the soiled area,
wait three minutes,
then blot gently...

As she stood barefoot in the grass, she wondered how long it would take her to start growing roots.

"Today I decided I have attention deficit disorder," she said.
"Except it doesn't mean I'm not paying enough attention.
It means I'm not getting enough."

He wrote:
Your letdown was impressive.
I can't remember the last time I got that far out on a limb and had it bend gently to the ground rather than snapping and landing on top of me.
You definitely know how to engineer a soft landing when you want to.

The crowded ice in Central Park frustrated her.
Her rhythm and flow could not fit into the open spaces their bodies created.
She needed to carve paths of her own.

When she said she was starting her own company, they would ask if she had a business plan.
"No," she said.
Then again, maybe that was her plan.

I put my feet up on his side of the bench and he said he wanted to kiss me.
Wouldn't it be nice if we could all cross borders and get kisses in return?

"I have a duty," he said. And she wondered why he wasn't headed for the bathroom.

"Do you understand what he's saying?" she asked
"No," he said
"Then why do you agree with him?"
"Beacuse it makes him stop talking."

She looked at the onion ring and then placed it on her finger...and all at once she was tranformed into a magical fairy princess.

He said he was jealous of the attention she gave her cats and she wondered if she should give him a bowl of turkey and giblets too.

She flew over her office in a jet plane and wondered how all of those big people could fit into a 3-inch tall building.

When she was young, she used the curtain rod in her bedroom as a ballet barre and pretended she was a ballerina. Now she wears a suit and carries a laptop and pretends she's not.

"How can you love me?," she asked. "How can I be your girlfriend when you don't even know what my hair looks like in a ponytail?"

They spent their first day together and it felt like every other day they knew they had spent together before.

He came running to her door in New Balance sneakers. That's funny, she thought, I always thought Prince Charming used a white horse.

She wished her legs could skate as well as her heart, but her head seemed to have a few extra toe picks.

There were stickers of rhinoceri and a sun and she placed the sun over the rhino's face so that he'd always be sure to see it.

She bought a book on "How to Get Ideas" and wondered how she ever thought to buy the book...

He said, "Let's skate at Rockefeller Center!" She asked if he knew how. "No," he said, "but there's a speed skater inside of me that doesn't know that yet."

She wished her legs were shorter so she could learn how to take baby steps again.