Thank you for kind and humbling beginnings. Thank you for the enlightenment that perhaps the inaptitude had never been in anyone else at all, but had been in me. Thank you for being the tea person that you are (because god, how I hate coffee!!!). Thank you for realizing and appreciating that I try my damndest to be the best I can be. Thank you for taking photos of me; the out-of-focus and overexposed ones are the closest to reality we can ever get. Thank you for the advice; that should there be an apocaplypse, a drought or a deluge, a stampede, perhaps a great depression, remember to choose either the highest or the lowest ground, but just make sure it’s the stablest of all grounds. Thank you for putting up with my awkwardness—I hate doing the ‘Bone’ dance and the ‘Bobbing Head’ dance but it makes you laugh, so I do it anyway. Thank you for leaving; for never coming back; for the malevolence you have instilled in me that there is no remaining happiness in this world; because I found greater jubilee after you left. Thank you for telling me not to trust the speak-easies. Thank you for worn-out friendship bands and bracelets; there’s just not much material left, they say. Thank you for reassuring things, for clarifying that darkness is the measurable absence of  visible light. That darkness is not a separate entity. That darkness has something to do with photons. That darkness can be explained with the burning passion of physics and chemistry.  That darkness was a song, was a glam rock band, was a horror movie, was a disambiguation. And that darkness isn’t so bad after all.