What remains, always: a hope, stubborn and inimitable. A loyalty to her own heart. The knowledge embedded in her bones. Someone could have said to her, “Look how blue the ocean is,” but she – bent on seeing green – would have refused to believe it. A trick of the eye, she would have told herself, and sure enough, the light would bend and the blue would go away and in its place the greenest green, an unequivocal, incontestable green. This is the way it always is. She must see it to know it. She must taste it in her mouth, hold it in her hands, feel the truth of it on her own terms, with her own senses. It is sometimes inconvenient to be so optimistic. Her faith in implausible outcomes creates confusion and, occasionally, anxiety, in others, her compass illegible as hieroglyphics. But when stops trying to make things easier, more palatable for someone else, when she resists the urge to package and perform, when she allows the river of her wild instinct to carve its way around the cumbersome opinions of others, she comes face to face with the real contours of her own life. And it is messy and imprecise and muddy and frayed at the seams, and it is whole and light and depth and wonder and it is unmistakably, unstoppably hers.