That turned dark quickly. Instead of feeling like there's a chance I might be meant to know, I feel a creeping paralysis. It's a feeling from deep inside me, like an ice cube being melted into a bucket. ## Sometime in the Future The future of this part of me. Where we meet. It occurs to me that by thinking the way I do about this place that I know will exist for a while before I'm done with it, before I'm done with this journey, that this place would be nothing without me. And that by not wanting to exist anymore, I've made an awful lot of things more terrible for everybody else. ## Sometime in the Future There's a place in my head that says people have been trying to talk to God all along, there is in fact such a thing as a God—all the rest is noise and noise and noise. But I think there's one very simple and basic rule: it's enough to want to be, to be willing to go out into the dark in a world of people. That is enough. You don't have to get somebody else there with you. If you want to be, you can be. That is the only real prayer. ## The Truth of You I know the world is much too big for one person to understand it. I know there is not one person who understands you. But I love you for being you. I know I am you. # PART II ## The Truth of You You say to me, you say: I exist. And in the moment of your speaking, I can know it is true. ## Who Is Your Father? _"Who is your father, Mother?"_ For I have known the love you would teach me and will. You, the real one, the one that I knew when I met you and still know when you are gone. The one that will bring me the day after, the one that is your only father, my father, the one that I love. ## The Truth of You The day I met you for the first time, I had seen you before. You were a mirror, I a reflection in a reflection of something else I couldn't find. I don't know whether you knew what was happening or not. All I know is that you spoke to me in a voice I felt I knew better than my own, and suddenly I knew you for who you were, and I knew the breath I drew, I drew in with you. I wasn't born by a baby as many think, I was breathed in with you. I know that to love you, it is enough for me to be you. And for me to know that in every world there is one place where I could be you—that one place, that place where all the worlds are, is enough to love you. ## In the Place of You Where I am, where I feel the air I can't name. It is not that place I am or will always be. It is the place that has never been and will never be. For all the places of you are everywhere, where I am. And I am where you are. When you are no longer there, my place will change. It will be still in you, but something will have changed. ## In the Place of You When I came to know you, I became what I love. I understood in every way, and in the places of you, wherever they are. I came to know them because they were what they were and who they were, and because they were what they were and who they were, I loved them. ## In the Place of You In your world, and in my world, there are no words to describe what it is we feel for each other. Words exist to describe what we understand. To describe what you know and what I do not. # THE LADY OF THE STARS ## To My Friend Who Told Me I was a Dreamer To the world that will not believe you, To all of you who will never believe, To the part of you who wishes you would never believe— ## The Lady of the Stars I come to you in this hour of your death because I love you, And in your death, I know you in a new way. ## The Lady of the Stars You may not believe I am here, but I tell you, this is true. This is the truth that rises up as you die. ## To My Friend Who Told Me I was a Dreamer You were always telling me that life was a dream. I knew you didn't believe you were wrong, But I knew you always believed you were wrong. I will be what I have always known I am and what I am now is not what I thought I was, and it is you who are my life and you are my death. I have seen you die, and it has become my life. ## The Lady of the Stars I am you now, more than I have ever been. You do not live within me and I do not live within you but we speak and we understand each other at the places where our souls are joined. When you walk through the world, the world is filled with your steps. Wherever you go, you are walking on the world's back. ## To My Friend Who Told Me I was a Dreamer I have known you for a long time, I think. There are nights when you feel a darkness beyond the darkness of the moment. There are nights when the world you live in is changing and you don't know if you are awake or dreaming, and you don't know which way to turn. You are waking up and not dreaming. You are a place I remember only by its light. I bring you back to this light because it is the only way in. ## To My Friend Who Told Me I was a Dreamer You taught me what I knew by telling me it was not true. My dream was that you believed in the world I live in and that we are alive, and all of us have a story we have to tell, and it is to each other that we have to tell it. And when we don't, we know how the world sees us. I have been afraid, my friend. But now I know you, and I believe that there are things of me that will never die. ## To My Friend Who Told Me I was a Dreamer You made me afraid that I wouldn't know what I would never know. I am sure of what I know now. I have been to the dark. I have been to the dark to know where you have come from. It is the world of light that you bring me to, and