I had just come to accept that my life would be ordinary when extraordinary things began to happen. The first of these came as a terrible shock and, like anything that changes you forever, split my life into halves: Before and After.
What I believe when it comes to big things in life, there are no accidents. Everything happens for a reason. You are here for a reason – and it’s not to fail and die.
Laughing doesn’t make bad things worse any more than crying makes them better. It doesn’t mean you don’t care, or that you’ve forgotten. It just means you’re human.
I grew up feeling like a weirdo like many kids do. But I was lucky to find my own home for peculiar children. I went to a school for the gifted in Florida, and it was full of kids who – we were all strange together. And that was a real blessing.
Maybe it was better, now and then, to wonder.
I have an unusual hobby: I collect pictures of people I don’t know. It started when I was a kid growing up in South Florida, the land of junk stores, garage sales, and flea markets, as a kind of coping mechanism.
So one day my mother sat me down and explained that I couldn’t become an explorer because everything in the world had already been discovered. I’d been born in the wrong century, and I felt cheated.
Our debt was too great and the words thank you too small.
Some truths are expressed best in the form of myth.
If I never went home, what exactly would I be missing? I pictured my cold cavernous house, my friendless town full of bad memories, the utterly unremarkable life that had been mapped out for me. It had never once occurred to me, I realized, to refuse it.
There was a girl who could fly, a boy who had bees living inside him, a brother and sister who could lift boulders over their heads.
I’d been born in the wrong century, and I felt cheated.
Strange, I thought, how you can be living your dreams and your nightmares at the very same time.
Every snapshot collector has obsessions. Some only collect photos of cars. Others like World War II, or babies, or old-timey girls in old-timey swimsuits. I happen to collect the weird stuff: photos that make the hair on the back of your neck stand up a little. The uncanny.
It’s easy to say you don’t care about money when you have plenty of it.
I never remember nice dreams; only the bad ones stick.
I’m no expert on girls, but when one tries to pinch you four times, I’m pretty sure that’s flirting.
Do you ever find yourself climbing into an open grave during a bombing raid and wish you’d just stayed in bed?
I liked this idea: that peculiarness wasn’t a deficiency, but an abundance; that it wasn’t we who lacked something normals had, but they who lacked peculiarness. That we were more, not less.
But these weren’t the kind of monsters that had tentacles and rotting skin, the kind a seven-year-old might be able to wrap his mind around-they were monsters with human faces, in crisp uniforms, marching in lockstep, so banal you don’t recognize them for what they are until it’s too late.