You don't run down your list of things to do that would quiet your howling heart, because you know that here, now, none of these things will work. You spend the morning prowling from bedroom to lounge room to kitchen to lounge room to kitchen to lounge room to bedroom to bathroom to bedroom to lounge room and stop in that one place from which you can see all three rooms, turning and turning and turning and turning, looking for something, anything, but there's nothing to quiet your howling heart, and you pace again to kitchen to lounge room to bedroom to bathroom to bedroom to lounge room to kitchen to lounge room.

You have nowhere to go but you go anyway. You stride out into the rain and the wind, putting all your fury into the stretch and pull of your muscles carrying you down these streets and past these homely houses and lazy Sunday afternoons, but not all angry stalking in the world can quiet your howling heart. Your feet take you to the theatre, and you buy a ticket to the next movie starting, and sit in the dark, and wait.

You read The Reader for university, all of nine years ago. You remember pantyhose, and distaste, and a sense of the interminable number of pages between beginning and end. You remember thinking it was silly, pointless, too in love with its own tragedy, and the characters needed a slap upside the head.

You realise, sitting in the dark with these strangers around you, that you just hadn't lived long enough to understand. You wonder how many things you disdain now that in another few years will be clear, and expose you as small, narrow and foolish. You're too young. You don't know enough. You will never know enough. You can feel all your ignorance unfurling around you, and no one is listening, the piano is playing, but still you can't quiet your howling heart.

You stride out into the rain and the wind, and now it is dark. You choose the streets with no lights, and walk in the shadows of trees. You can't see where you're going, but that's okay, because you can't see with tears in your eyes, and you can't be seen here, between leaving and arriving.

You can't quiet a howling heart.

You can only wait, until you can raise your voice above it.

And you say-