\n\n\nEverything she said was filtered through her own awareness of how good her ass looked, the words she spoke merely an afterthought compared to the glory at the bottom of those shorts. ^ref-56208
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\n\n\nEverything was so strange. Life was okay, though. Life was maybe even kind of cute. You simply had to expect nothing from it. ^ref-52820
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\n\n\nMy propensity was to strip off masks as quickly as possible, lay everything out, so as to relieve the discomfort of having to wear one in the first place. ^ref-52116
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\n\n\nIt was as though some wonderful future event were being extended backward in time. The future event needed only to exist so that I could have this excitement and anticipation now. ^ref-33378
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\n\n\nWas this how everything was now? Just nice? I wondered if other people felt comfortable within niceness, or whether they didn’t even notice that things were nice. Maybe they expected everything to be nice. Maybe nice was like air to them. ^ref-16371
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\n\n\nMaybe I didn’t need someone else to define me, but oh, I still wanted it. How vacuous was I? How empty was I that I needed a border drawn by someone else to tell me who I was? ^ref-39019
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\n\n\nMaybe once that person became too real, too familiar, they could no longer get you high—no longer be a drug—and that was why you grew tired of them. That was what had happened to me and Jamie. It was only when he was pushing me away—and then after he was gone—that he became a drug. It was so much easier for someone to be the drug before or after the relationship. When they were absent they were exciting. When they were right there it was a different story. ^ref-43391
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\n\n\nWhat if everything was natural? What if there was no wrong or right action in terms of who you loved, who you wanted, or who you were drawn to? If the will of the universe was the will of the universe, and if everything was happening as it was, then wasn’t everything you could possibly do all right? ^ref-57612
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\n\n\n“I don’t know if that’s love or something else,” I said. “But I don’t think it’s love if the person disappears.” “I wouldn’t say it’s not love,” he said. “But it’s hard. That is a very painful experience.” ^ref-15077
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\n\n\nHe intuitively knew exactly what to say to have me writhing. Or perhaps I planted the words in him, as so much of what our lovers do and say is imagined. We turn them into who we want them to be. We fill in their bodies and words for them. ^ref-54468
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\n\n\nIn some ways, my moods did and did not exist. People said that you could will a mood into being or will it away. Just think positively. But I never felt that way. My moods were their own entities, even if no one could understand why they were there. That was what made me scared of feelings. ^ref-14586
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\n\n\nHe wasn’t missing my predictability. He was wanting me because he could no longer have me. He could tell I was gone and that was a new spell for him. ^ref-4343
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\n\n\nThose women instinctively knew how to get a man and keep a man, each man interchangeable with the next: a torso, a dick, a pair of hands. Those women knew how to embrace whichever assembly-line man they were given. They knew how to breathe new life into him day after day and see what they had as special. They were like living psalms. There were no holes in their lives. Those women had never met a void a day in their life. They simply didn’t see any. ^ref-57368
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\n\n\nIf I was dead and he wasn’t dead, did that mean he had all the power? If I died for him, it was kind of like him not texting me back on a cosmic level. ^ref-39817
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\n\n\nHow much beauty was I projecting upon him, and how much was the moon? And if I was not projecting the beauty, and it was not the moon, how much of him was real beyond the beauty? I wondered if we were ever not projecting. We think we’ve grown or learned something, but maybe it’s always just a new projection. ^ref-24528
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