I got tired, I told him. Not worn out, but worn through. Like one of those wives who wakes up one morning and says I can't bake any more bread.<br />You never bake bread, he wrote, and we were still joking.<br />Then it's like I woke up and baked bread, I said, and we were joking even then. I wondered will there come a time when we won't be joking? And what would it look like? And how would that feel?<br />When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much. A calender that showed the wrong month. I could have cried over it. I did. Where the smoke from the chimney ended. How an overturned bottle rested at the edge of a table.<br />I spent my life learning to feel less.<br />Every day I felt less.<br />Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?<br />You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.