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Sometimes it gets to be too much, and you just have to take a break.

It’s all right if they see that you have to go out back to collect yourself, to keep yourself from crying.

They say it’s understandable, though they don’t actually understand the reason.

Some people’s fates just can’t be improved, however hard you try.

You know who they are.

And some days they all come in together.

It’s hard to take.

Not crying is actually the easy part—there’s one easy fix, which is to find a target.

Sadness is holding on to pain.

But sadness with a target is anger.

So I took a break, sometimes, to be properly angry. There was a dumpster behind the shelter that had many a dent in it from my bad days.

Usually I made sure there was no one around before taking out my frustration. I thought I had that day, as well, but while I was waling away at the dumpster a soft voice came, saying, “Excuse me, miss?”

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This one’s also a bit more rambly than I’m fond of…

I don’t like to generalize.  It’s too easy to generalize—to say, I helped a lot of people—but then it stops being meaningful.

You help one person, concrete and specific, and that’s great… You help a lot of people, —well, it’s a lot, just one lot, no matter how many are in it; and it’s hard to be excited about an abstract category.  Humans and demihumans alike have trouble with scale.

So I can’t talk to you about a lot of people.  Even ‘one person’ is a bit abstract.  I’ll talk to you about Jevin.

When we’d first met, it’d already been a horrible day for me…

I can’t save everyone.  Ultimately, I don’t think I can save anybody—everyone die, sooner or later—but there are better and worse ways to go.

I saw pretty early that I wouldn’t really be able to do much with my talent as a doctor, which was my first thought.  There woludn’t be much changing lives—mostly people would only come in for problems they already knew they had, and any human doctor can give decent odds on how a person would make out—I’d just be better at it.

Instead, I volunteered to work with the homeless.

I keep apologizing because I don’t know where to start.  You get used to feeling awkward when you see every person’s death with them.

You’d think I’d get used to it after a bit, but I never could.

So, forgive me if I have trouble knowing where to begin sometimes.  I’m too busy thinking about how things end.