But mothers lie. It’s in the job description.
Nothing really mattered that much, not the good things and not the bad ones. We were in the business of mutual amusement, and we were reasonably prosperous.
I realize that they giggle and I actually laugh, that they show their cleavage and I have none to show, but just so you know, I am also a girl. I’m one of the three wise MEN. And it’s gay to think that James Bond is hot.
I said nothing – I hadn’t known Marya, and anyway, “listening quietly” was my general social strategy.
And since she drove to work every morning, I could only use the car on weekends. Well, weekends and the middle of the goddamned night.
Was it animal pee or human pee? Someone asked. How would I know? What, am I an expert in the study of pee?
Reading it the night before, I’d wondered if it would be like that for me-if in one moment, I would finally understand her, know her, and understand the role I’d played in her dying. But I wasn’t convinced enlightenment struck like lightining.
But before we can radically reshape the world, we need to shop.
I stand in this parking lot, realizing that I’ve never been this far from home, and here is this girl I love and cannot follow. I hope this is the hero’s errand, because not following her is the hardest thing I’ve ever done.
It doesn’t matter how long we’ve used something; all that matters is how awesome the thing replacing it is. MP3s and automobiles happen to be really, really awesome, whereas ebooks – at least so far – are fairly limited in their awesomeness.
A novel is a conversation between a reader and a writer.
We Play the broken string of our instruments one last time.
I didn’t know whether to trust Alaska, and I’d certainly had enough of her unpredictability – cold one day, sweet the next; irresistibly flirty one moment, resistibly obnoxious the next. I preferred the Colonel: At least when he was cranky, he had a reason.
I expertly angled my raison bran to accomodate the g-forces.
Mental health days only exist for people who have the luxury of saying ‘I don’t want to deal with things today’ and then can take the whole day off, while the rest of us are stuck fighting the fights we always fight, with no one really caring one way or another, unless...
We can hear others, and we can travel with them without moving, and we can imagine them, and we are all connected one to the other by a crazy root system, like so many leaves of grass. But the game makes me wonder wheter we can really ever fully become another.
Walt Whitman is HOT! I mean, that guy could sound his barbaric yawps over the roofs of my world any time.
The truth is that in our lives we are all going to encounter questions that should be answered, that deserve to be answered, and yet prove unanswerable.
She is close enough to me that I can see her, because even now there is the outward sign of visible light, even at night in this parking lot on the outskirts of Algoe. After we kiss, our foreheads touch as we stare at each other. Yes, I can see her almost perfectly in this cracked darkness.
But once that string gets cut, kid, you can’t uncut it. Do you get what I’m saying?