When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. <br />Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much. A calendar that showed the wrong month. I could have cried over it. I did. Where the smoke from a 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.