“I’m guessing rituals like weddings are important to you,” Jack said to me.

“…yes and no?” I said. “I actually don’t have a lot of patience with ritual for ritual’s sake. What means something to me is a ceremony that means something to the participants, that makes a statement more than ‘this is the phase of my life I’m in so I’m doing the thing that one does now’. A wedding, or a funeral, anything like that… it should be personal, like a piece of art. It should express something.”

“Is that why the idea makes you nervous? Because you’d have to stand up and say something?”

“Oh, no,” I said. “I’m not at all afraid to say things through art. The best way to say anything worth saying to anyone is by releasing a piece of art out into the world and then going to hide forever.”