All the Bright Places

“When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don’t
seem to matter very much, do they?”
I’m full-on cheating now, pulling up every Virginia Woolf site I can find. I
wonder if she’s cheating too. I write: 
“I am rooted, but I flow.”
I nearly change my mind. I think about deleting the line, but then she writes
back. 
I like that one. Where is it from?
The Waves.
I cheat again and find the passage. 
Here’s more: “I feel a
thousand capacities spring up in me. I am arch, gay, languid, melancholy
by turns. I am rooted, but I flow. All gold, flowing …”
I decide to end there, mostly because I’m in a hurry to see if she’ll write
back.
It takes her three minutes. 
I like: “This is the most exciting moment I
have ever known. I flutter. I ripple. I stream like a plant in the river,
flowing this way, flowing that way, but rooted, so that he may come to
me. ‘Come,’ I say, ‘come.’ ”
My pulse isn’t the only part of my body stirring now. I adjust myself and
think how weirdly, stupidly sexy this is.
I write, 
You make me feel gold, flowing.
I post it without thinking. I can
go on quoting Virginia Woolf—believe me, the passage gets even hotter—but
I decide I want to quote myself instead.
I wait for her response. I wait for three minutes. Five minutes. Ten. Fifteen.
I open up her website, the one she ran with her sister, and check the date of
the last post, which hasn’t changed since the last time I looked.
I get it
, I think. 
Not gold, not flowing. Standing still
.
Then another message appears: 
I got your rules for wandering and I
have an addition: We don’t travel in bad weather. We walk, jog, or ride
bikes. No driving. We don’t go far from Bartlett.
52

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She is all business now. I reply: