Dark Places

by Gillian Flynn

Or maybe not. The murders had left me permanently off-kilter in these kinds of judgment calls. I assumed everything bad in the world could happen, because everything bad in the world already did happen.

It is always consoling to think of suicide; it’s what gets one through many a bad night.

When I was fourteen, I thought a lot about killing myself—it’s a hobby today, but at age fourteen it was a vocation.

To move meant he could partake and he didn’t want to, he didn’t want to feel that bull’s flesh breaking open under him, not because it was wrong but because it might feel too good to him, like the weed, where the first time he took a drag he knew he’d never quit it. Like the smoke found a place inside him that had been left hollow just for the smoke, and had curled up in there. There might be a space too, for this. The feel of killing, there might be an empty spot just waiting to be filled.