If you listen to the wind very carefully, you’ll be able to hear me whisper my love for you.
Accidents ambush the unsuspecting, often violently, just like love.
You’ll swoop from incredible highs when you’re just glad to be alive, to those lows when you wish you were dead. And just when you start thinking that you’ve accepted who you are, that changes, too. Because who you are is not permanent.
There I lay, wearing dead people as armor against death.
Boredom was my bedmate and it was hogging the sheets.
I am more than my scars.
My skin will never work like that again, so aware of the other person that I’m unsure where she ends and I begin. Never again. Never again will my skin be a thing that can so perfectly communicate; in losing my skin to the fire, I also lost the opportunity to make it disappear with another person.
It’s not easy to look the way I do: in popular culture, one only sees a face like mine on the Phaontom of the Opera, on Freddie Krueger from Elm Street, or on Leatherface from deep in the heart of Texas. Sure, a burn victim may “get the girl” – but usually only with a pickax.
The urge is always with me to retouch yesterday’s canvas with today’s paintbrush and cover the things that fill me with regret...
She had what I’d call a lemming ass – that is, an ass that you would follow right over the edge of the cliff.
Don’t be wasting your sympathy on me, kid. I did pretty damn well, I’ll tell you what. You snag a woman like that, you don’t ask what you did to deserve it. You just hope she never wises up and changes her mind.
These day’s I like to imagine that if a man were to enter through the slash on the book’s cover, as if it were a door, he could walk right into the heart of the Inferno.
Everyone’s past, I try to rationalize, is nothing more than the collection of memories they choose to remember.
Christ, I’m in Hell and they wear uniforms.
Every Good Friday, this anchored but ever-changing anniversary of my accident, I go to the little creek that saved my life and light one more candle. I offer thanks for two facts: that I am one year older, and that I am one year closer to death.
While I’m not claiming that I now feel great love for all people, I can state with some confidence that I hate fewer people than I used to. This may seem like a weak claim to personal growth, but sometimes these things should be judged by distance traveled rather than by current position.
Defeat itself is defeated by the embrace of defeat...
Coincidentally, a good age for a Japanese girl is younger than twenty five, because that’s when she turns into a ‘Christmas Cake’. Christmas cakes, as everyone knows, are desirable before the twenty fifth but afterward quickly become stale and are put on the shelf.