That is how loneliness protects itself.

It convinces you that the thing you need is the one thing not available to you, so that you will not risk the small humiliation of reaching for it.

And the terrible arithmetic of it is that the reaching is almost never as hard as the story says.

All that stood between me and the entire back half of my life was a chain-link gate and the willingness to look foolish in front of a stranger — to admit, at sixty, out loud, that I did not know how to grow a thing and wanted to learn.

Sal did not let me choose the story.