I checked to see if he and I had a special connection that was greater than his bond with his mother. We didn’t.
The word God asks a question and then answers it before there is any chance to wonder.
People love to make life harder than it has to be.
Live the dream, Potato.
And our very few intimacies were simply discontinued. Where did they go, those things we did? Were they recycled?
A real mother throws her heart over the fence and then climbs after it.
I saw the darkness swirling inside him. I saw that his feet did not touch the ground when he played basketball at recess. In moments, he was flying. Not like a bird but subtly, like a person.
I kept getting older while he stayed young, my tiny husband.
He pulled away, but his eyes held my eyes like hands.
For a split second I felt as though she was nobody special in the larger scheme of my life. She was just some girl who had tied me to her leg to help her sink when she jumped off the bridge. Then I bl...
I'm not saying I asked for it, only that there are moments when we are sending signals not just to the boys in the room but to all of creation.
I wondered how many other things had flown past me into death. Perhaps many. Perhaps I was flying past them, like the grim reaper, signaling the end. This would explain so much.
I wanted her to know, from the moment she heard my voice, that I was dying. I delivered a salutation so craven, so wretched, that it fell through language like pebbles. Hello.
I walked down the hall and saw that [she] was sitting on the floor next to a chair. This is always a bad sign. It's a slippery slope, and it's best just to sit in chairs, to eat when hungry, to sleep...
I could not make a move without making love.
Did she think it was temporary? Or maybe that was the point of love: not to think.
And together we pushed through paragraphs, painstakingly sounding out the words, knitting them into human sentences that said very little.
Then I realized that we all think we might be terrible people. But we only reveal this before we ask someone to love us. It is a kind of undressing.
It wasn’t just movies that couldn’t contain the full cast of characters — it was us. We had to winnow life down so we knew where to put our tenderness and attention; and that was a good, sweet thing....
It occurred to me that everyone’s story matters to themselves, so the more I listened, the more she wanted to talk.