She was the kind of girlfriend God gives you young, so you'll know loss the rest of your life.
You can't regret the life you didn't lead.
If you didn't grow up like I did then you don't know, and if you don't know it's probably better you don't judge.
Our relationship wasn't the sun, the moon, the stars, but it wasn't bullshit, either.
Dude, you don't want to be dead. Take it from me. No-pussy is bad. But dead is like no-pussy times ten.
Here at last is her smile: burn it into your memory; you won't see it often.
He whistles. Que viva Colombia. Hands you back the Book. You really should write the cheater's guide to love. You think? I do. It takes a while. You see the tall girl. You go to more doctors. You celebrate Arlenny's Ph.D defense. And then one June night you scribble the ex's name and: The half-life of love is forever. You bust out a couple more things. Then you put your head down. The next day you look at the new pages. For once you don't want to burn them or give up writing forever. It's a start, you say to the room. That's about it. In the months that follow you bend to the work, because it feels like hope, like grace—and because you know in your lying cheater's heart that sometimes a start is all we ever get.
Success, after all, loves a witness, but failure can't exist without one.
Trauma is a time traveller, an ouroboros that reaches back and devours everything that came before.
I certainly couldn't have survived my childhood without books. All that deprivation and pain--abuse, broken home, a runaway sister, a brother with cancer--the books allowed me to withstand. They sustained me. I read still, prolifically, with great passion, but never like I read in those days: in those days it was life or death.
