Blue outweighs green slightly. June is heavier than all of the other months. The Rolling Stones are much heavier than Bon Jovi. Cats outweigh dogs. Reading and writing outweigh math and science. Logic usually outweighs flights of fancy, but flights of fancy sometimes take the upper hand. Reason and emotion are usually neck and neck. The shelf is full of bags of family members, friends, and aquaintances. Thought and individuality have more sand than religion. Fear of death is a tiny sandbag compared to fear of others' deaths. Hope for the future weighs a little less than memory of the past. Success, family, life, and trust are all importantly heavy bags. But there are two bags above all the others. One of them is love. The other is the most important person of all, the person she values even more than her own life. These two bags are never weighed against each other, because they are essentially one and the same.

As the years pass, the hundreds and thousands of bags have sand added or removed, or are even replaced entirely. Nothing stays the same forever, and the sand is constantly between the bags as her desires and thoughts change. She can usually tell right away how much sand to place in a bag, and as she gets older, she gets better at filling the bags that really matter. It takes time for the sand to shift between friends, for some bags to empty and others to fill. Her brain scale is constantly teetering with the weights of her life.

Rarely do the sandbags break. But when they do, and the sand of her trust scatters across her feet, she can't bear to sweep up the sand right away. She can feel the coarse grains under her toes for days, weeks, years. Until at last she finds a new bag to fill, a bag to replace her trust. But the broom always misses a few grains. When she sees them, she picks them up and puts them sadly into the memory bag. The sand cannot be lost forever. Just rearranged.