By Terri Ciccone

The wind is knocked out of you. You can’t figure out if you’re so incredibly happy or so impossibly mad, and you’re confused how they can feel so similar. You might burst, explode, boil over, your face hurts from smiling, your gut hurts from crying, your throat hurts from screaming and laughing, you’re being stretched in two different directions but going the same way. You don’t know if you’re in heaven or in hell. Yet there is serenity.