Anika says that if you don't tell someone about something that's happened to you it's like it never happened. I want to disagree—it's often what I don't tell that lives on and on and is real only because it is protected from abridgment or reinterpretation. But, she is mostly right. We do need to tell; telling adds legitimacy and, sometimes, objectiveness. This is particularly true when something horrible happens that the mind can't rationalize.

Although, I would submit that the crucial part of telling is not the telling but the being heard. And, if you aren't heard, then the telling in the first place can do more harm to the existence of a thing than the keeping it to yourself. This is the part I am thinking of when I doubt her statement.

Putting aside the complexities of telling or not telling of the horrible things that happen, consider the incredible, wonderful things that happen that can't be told simply because they can't adequately be heard. These are treasures to be guarded. The perfect loves of your life. In you, they remain as you experienced them and will never be more or less than that depth.

Let go and slipped through the night to a bright capillary where men and women coursed amid varieties of light that played the medium and pulsed them. A shadow became a woman pedaling languidly under a streetlight, the undulations of her long hair trailing her as if a dragon's tail on the wind. Suddenly a throng of bicycles blazed silently out of the dark, the spastic bursts of ambient neon glinting off glasses lenses, chrome fenders and spokes, and the pelt of jet black hair.

The stream rushed south, pouring onto a white-hot arterial teeming with shoulder-to-shoulder anonymity. Figures hugged the dark inclines under eaves, sloughed there by the cars and motorcycles and bicycles and pedestrians on the way. Women weary in heels stepped delicately after men into stairways, whether down or up. Others rested in incandescent eddies of convenience, idly circulating among smut and snacks.

I drifted among them until the first dullness pressed behind my eyes, signalling that it was time recollect the senses. I am never really lost. A second of thought and I had measured the distance. It was just a right turn from there, a step out of the light and into the gutter shadow. A straight shot back.