Two things:

First, have you noticed how the way people write and the way people talk don't always coincide? I mean, I think of myself and see the way I put words together while speaking to someone face to face, and I so often stumble and backtrack and hesitate. While, for some reason, when I sit down to write something, I'm usually able to at least approximate how I feel. I wonder why it's so different. I wonder how I can have these two different voices that are both somehow mine; it makes me wonder which is my real voice.

The second thing is this: it doesn't matter how often you're reminded that wishing for something doesn't change reality; there's always something convincing about the power of longing when it comes over you, as though it should bend the world around you until it's shaped to the form you wish it. You become convinced that there's something to it, that all that power must change some corner of the world and surpise you with goodness.

Once, when I was very young, I drew a picture of a fantastical animal. I named it, and wrote the name beneath the drawing. I became convinced within myself that if I just remembered to put the picture into our mailbox on my birthday, that animal would become real, and would come to me and be my own forever and ever. Of course, when my birthday came, I forgot about the drawing amidst all the festivities of the day. And afterwards I always wondered what would have happened if I had left the drawing in the mailbox.

Longing is like that; it convinces you that reality must somehow conform itself to the shape of your hope. And then it doesn't. And you remember that you really are just one solitary human being, whose feelings, though powerful and real to you, are confined wholly within your own frame, that others cannot sense them, and that the world must function according to its own rules, and cannot change itself for one individual.

What a selfish thing it is to have these feelings. What a selfish and foolish and vain and wonderful thing.

And I still can't help hoping that I'll walk around the corner someday and see that strange and beautiful and completely make-believe animal waiting just for me. I know I never will, but it doesn't change the longing. Not even a little.