The ghosts that exert the most power in people__ lives-at least, the people I know__end to be of their own making, and consist of equal parts regret and old fears and just plain missing somebody.

Shirts and jeans litter the asphalt, the empty fabric limbs askew as if they're attempting to escape. Blood smears Sarah's lips as she struggles against the chest of a dirty looking man with a beard. Terror. Terror is the only word my mind can seize on and it forgets what it means. I forget how to think - to move.

Those who cannot conceive Friendship as a substantive love but only as a disguise or elaboration of Eros betray the fact that they have never had a Friend. The rest of us know that though we can have erotic love and friendship for the same person yet in some ways nothing is less like a Friendship than a love-affair. Lovers are always talking to one another about their love; Friends hardly ever about their Friendship. Lovers are normally face to face, absorbed in each other; Friends, side by side, absorbed in some common interest. Above all, Eros (while it lasts) is necessarily between two only. But two, far from being the necessary number for Friendship, is not even the best. And the reason for this is important.... In each of my friends there is something that only some other friend can fully bring out. By myself I am not large enough to call the whole man into activity; I want other lights than my own to show all his facets... Hence true Friendship is the least jealous of loves. Two friends delight to be joined by a third, and three by a fourth, if only the newcomer is qualified to become a real friend. They can then say, as the blessed souls say in Dante, 'Here comes one who will augment our loves.' For in this love 'to divide is not to take away.

You could say that they were sweet, or you could say that they were something out of a horror movie.

Eve was happy for her bestie. She just wished she had a guy who would look at her the way Seth looked at her friend, eyes all starry.No, that wasn't it. Or it wasn't completely it. Eve knew there were guys at school who liked her and would give her the Seth-look if she gave them the opportunity. But she didn't want the look from any of those guys. She wanted the look she could give the look back to. She wanted to find a guy she could all-out love who would all-out love her back.

No child should ever be too sad to play.