But our stories, our living-and-breathing, flesh-and-blood, toss-and-turn-all-night, hit-the-snooze-seven-times lives don’t ever fit into the formats we’ve chosen, and I guess I haven’t learned that yet—and not for lack of opportunities. This is a stubborn one for me: Life doesn’t follow us. We follow it. We run after it, fight against it, catch up to it, make sense of it, get used to it—but it happens to us, not the other way around.

