She brought home an armload of scarves one afternoon. Colorful pieces of fabric, swirls of greens and greys and blues and browns and reds, each one a different pattern. She hung them in her room, hanging on the door handle, catching stray beams of light and adding a burst of color in an unexpected place. Occasionally someone would ask her why she'd bought them. She would reply that they had caught her eye, and she couldn't decide which one to bring home, so she'd brought them all. She always insisted that she'd find a use for them, someday. And she did, finally. They walked into the room and as they pushed the door inward, no colorful fabrics fluttered on the door handle. Her feet swung eighteen inches off the ground, and the swirls of color rotated slowly, knotted in a cord of irrelevant patterns that stretched from the ceiling straight down. Her eyes were open, blue the color that was reflected in the strip of fabric knotted around her neck.

*

Donna climbed into the passenger seat of the station wagon and looked up through pink-rimmed glasses, seeing her mother's eyes reflected in the rearview mirror. "I had a crayon, and it was blue and indigo at the same time. And it was so beautiful, so I broke it, to see if I could see inside the beauty." And her mother nodded her head and started the car, and Donna felt inside the pocket of her denim jumper for the two melting halves of crayon, broken and without beauty.

*

I believe in dragons.

Really. I'm twenty years old, and I have no problem believing in flying lizards. Some of them breathe fire, some of them eat maidens, some of them are the size of a housecat. I believe they are out there, and if we look hard enough, and believe long enough, we might be lucky enough to see one.

I believe in the impossible. I believe in dragons and true love and the tooth fairy and the things like that. I'm not going to go out looking for them, because half of the fun of belief is not knowing. There's a lot I don't know, and part of the reason I write is to explore those things - to puzzle them out on paper, get some thoughts about things down, and maybe come to some conclusion. But if I don't, that's fine too.