Book excerpt: What does it mean to claim space and live one's best life? How can we accept our hardened selves as much as we care for our vulnerability? In Meet Me Where the Sea Touches the Sky, Krithika Akkaraju asks these questions and more, as she brings her experience as a mental health practitioner to her debut book of poems. The poems explore the universal polarities of our existence: growth and transformation; life and death; joy and grief; on the isolation we sometimes feel in our relationships, the permissions we give and deny ourselves; and the new ways we find to cope, survive, and even enjoy our lives. And so, in reading this book, dear reader, may you find that space where life is a little bit of everything…a space Where the Sea Touches the Sky.