“I felt, that night, on that stage, under that skull, incredibly close to everything in the universe, but also extremely alone.”

He was someone whom everyone admired and liked but whom nobody knew. He was like a book that you could feel good holding, that you could talk about without ever having read, that you could recommend.

What does it remember like?

I took the world into me, rearranged it, and sent it back out as a question: “Do you like me?

Fiction works when it makes a reader feel something strongly.

We shared the smile of recognizing ourselves in each other, how many imposters do I have? Do we all make the same mistakes, or has one of us gotten it right, or even just a bit less wrong, am I the imposter?

My wife and I have chosen to bring up our children as vegetarians. In another time or place, we might have made a different decision. But the realities of our present moment compelled us to make that choice.

With writing, we have second chances.

Sadness of not knowing enough words to [express what you mean].

Why are you leaving me? He wrote, I do not know how to live. I do not know either but I am trying. I do not know how to try. There were some things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him. So i buried them and let them hurt me

Please be truthful, but also please be benevolent, please.

Memory was supposed to fill the time, but it made time a hole to be filled.

I thought for a minute, and then I got heavy, heavy boots.

Everything I did, I did because I thought it was the correct thing to do, I am not a hero, it is true, But I am not a bad person, either.

He promised us that everything would be okay. I was a child, but I knew that everything would not be okay. That did not make my father a liar. It made him my father.

Am I such a bad person for dreaming of a world that ends when I do? I don’t mean the world ending with respect to me, but every set of eyes closing with mine.

She let out a laugh, and then she put her hand over her mouth, like she was angry at herself for forgetting her sadness.