oneword.: depth: "I don't feel out of my depth anymore. All of a sudden I am in control and I think it is going to be alright "

oneword.: follow: "Wherever he asked I would follow. That was how I was, but maybe I am not like that anymore? Maybe the only road for me is my own road, I don't need anyone to follow anymore. "

oneword.: fiction: "I sink into it, my ongoing life of fiction. In that world I can have it all just however I like. In that world I am free, in that world, I am me. "

oneword.: sensitive: "He is that. I know that and yet I always hit out at him, because he can only see his own sensitivity and not mine. So his sensitivity is what I love about him and also what I hate. "

oneword.: sour: "Her mouth may have been misread and appear sour to those who didn't know her. When I first met her I swear I trembled in my shoes. With a sour face every day, she served me lunch all year, then when we left she packed me one of her best saucepans for me to cook his food with. I loved her, my almost-mother-in-law. I really loved her. "

oneword.: after: "After lunch he will be home with the car. after lunch I will go out driving alone for the first time, after lunch. "

oneword.: beam: "I can feel the hard cold wood, but I look straight ahead, I can feel their eyes on me, on my toes and how I move them, it is 1976 in the police youth club gym. I passed the gym level. I can feel the pride. "

oneword.: barely: "I can barely imagine it. This freedom was always something I believed that I would never have. So now that I can see it, now that it glimmers there like a star , now, is it really going to be mine? "

oneword.: half: "Half of me would like to just grab my bags and run, half of me would like to be the perfect everything, right here, half of me.....damn I clearly don't have enough halves! "

oneword.: measure: "I pour it like medicine. Balm for my day, red and tasty. I love my red wine. I just need to love it without loving it in too ample measure. "

oneword.: trade: "From here to there we trade. Tit for tat, a game we play. Like chess, or maybe more like snap? Is it luck that rules us or do we play to a carefully planned strategy? "

oneword.: drowning: "I try to keep my head up, I paddle furiously, but sometimes it feels as if I have weights tied to my legs. I feel myself sinking and today I just don't want to fight anymore. "

oneword.: grade: "I look at you, you move through your life with an assurance that I envy, a strength that I admire and you, my beautiful daughter, really will make the grade if you want to. It is all there for you like a road paved with gold. You can do anything, my beautiful girl, believe it. "

oneword.: daisy: "I learned to make a 'daisy' chain when I was ten, except we used clover flowers instead of daisies because there were so many on those green, green fields of my boarding school. "

oneword.: return: "I always plan to return the books on time. I try not to take too many out, no more than I can read in a month, but then, something always happens, the books sit on my nightstand, gathering dust and the library computer leaves rude messages on my answering machine. "

oneword.: raise: "It the sun warmed indoor air, I turn the gas on in the oven. On the open door, I place the dough, teatowel over and I wait, the room is perfect, rich and warm and yeast filled and I love the days in autumn when I make bread "

oneword.: synthetic: "There is nothing worse against my skin in winter than the static scrape of something synthetic, so foreign and raw that it almost hurts. "

oneword.: custom: "We have so few, at least so few that really matter, of course we have christmas every year and that always has the same format but even then the customs that we follow are confused with influences from too many cultures. Sometimes this is such a shallow culture, void of custom, void of meaning. "