I kept saying ‘always’ to her today, ‘always always always,’ and she just kept talking over me and not saying it back. It was like I was already gone, you know? ‘Always’ was a promise! How can you just break the promise?” “Sometimes people don’t understand the promises they’re making when they make them,” I said. Isaac shot me a look. “Right, of course. But you keep the promise anyway. That’s what love is. Love is keeping the promise anyway.
In some ways, pain is the opposite of language.
They laughed because something was funny; I laughed because they had.
You have to get lost before you can find yourself.
You’ll find my leg under the coffee table.
He’s trying to treat you like you’re normal and you’re trying to respond like you’re normal but everyone involved knows you are definitely not normal. Normal people can kiss if they want to kiss. Normal people don’t sweat like you. Normal people choose their thoughts like they choose what to watch on TV. Everyone in this conversation knows you’re a freak.
I didn’t really want to come back here and again have to feel like my lungs were drowning in this perverse nostalgia.
The worst thing that could happen had finally happened. And there was a kind of relief in it, maybe.
I knew that made-up things mattered, and could kill you.
But for some people, the invasive can kind of take over, crowding out all the other thoughts until it’s the only one you’re able to have, the thought you’re perpetually either thinking or distracting yourself from.
Partly, I kept forgetting, but also there was something else I couldn’t quite identify, some way-down fear that taking a pill to become myself was wrong.
I feel like I might not be driving the bus of my consciousness,” I said.
Life tries to crush her, but only succeeded in making a diamond.
Maybe scrambled eggs are ghettoized, but they’re also special. They have a place and a time, like church does.
Someday no one will remember that she ever existed.
The first few days, I kept checking my phone, waiting for him to reply, but slowly I understood that we were going to be part of each other’s past. I still missed him, though. I missed my dad, too. And Harold. I missed everybody. To be alive is to be missing.
I picked the college I attended partly because it had no math requirement.
Illness is a story told in the past tense.
WHAT AM I GOING TO DO? Tiny shouts in my ear, and I want to say, “Hopefully, go find a guy who knows there is no u in awesome.
And my life continued.