It would require constant vigilance to not replace each person with my own fictional version of them.
I looked out the window for other passengers in love with their drivers, but we were well disguised, we pretended boredom and prayed for traffic.
You always feel like you are the only one in the world, like everyone else is crazy for each other, but it’s not true. Generally, people don’t like each other very much. And that goes for friends, too.
I went to the bedroom and lay on the floor, so as not to mess up the covers.
When you can see the beauty of a tree, then you will know what love is.
He pulled away, but his eyes held my eyes like hands.
I don’t think I’m more of a screenwriter than I am a fiction writer. I’m more of a reader than a film-watcher, so I imagine that I’m not approaching fiction or films in a particularly cinematic way.
I steeled myself against laughter; I would rather die than laugh. I didn’t laugh, I did not laugh. But I died, I did die.
I nodded, pretending I was relaxed. I watched the sunlight sparkling on the water and practiced mind-body integration for a few seconds by quietly hyperventilating.
It was an act of devotion. A little like writing or loving someone – it doesn’t always feel worthwhile, but not giving up somehow creates unexpected meaning over time.
In my paranoid world every storekeeper thinks I’m stealing, every man thinks I’m a prostitute or a lesbian, every woman thinks I’m a lesbian or arrogant, and every child and animal sees the real me and it is evil.
It occurred to me that everyone’s story matters to themselves, so the more I listened, the more she wanted to talk.
All I ever really want to know is how other people are making it through life – where do they put their body, hour by hour, and how do they cope inside of it.
I wish there were a class where we could just keep going around the circle. around and around, until we had finally said everything about ourselves.
Did you ever really love her? Not really no. But me? Yes. Even though I have no pizzazz?
If there were a map of the solar system, but instead of stars it showed people and their degrees of separation, my star would be the one you had to travel the most light-years from to get to his. You would die getting to him.
And why had Deb’s last boyfriend dumped her? I dumped him. Maybe you didn’t French-kiss him enough. I promise you that wasn’t it. Tell me how many times a day you kissed, and I’ll say if it was enough. Four hundred. Not enough.
Life is just this way, broken, and I am crazy to hope for something else.
It was a small thing, but it was a thing, and things have a way of either dying or growing, and it wasn’t dying.
In an ideal world, we would have been orphans. We felt like orphans and we felt deserving of the pity that orphans get, but embarrassingly enough, we had parents.
We were always getting away with something, which implied that someone was always watching us, which mean were are not alone in this world.