Anyone's Ghost

by August Thompson

It was more a sense of urgency than of sternness—the thing, like a theoretical road trip years down the line, had to be agreed upon and finalized now, like everything unfinished was on the edge of vanishing.

I fell in love with the act of learning someone.

That the good part about getting older is that you get to choose, at some point, how much of other people you have to take on.”

he was just someone who was born hurt, spending his life paying it forward, maybe without meaning to.

he gave me a blanket pardon for the future, I’d have to give him a blanket pardon for the past. Being unforgiving was my only hope for power.

I was learning to meet sincerity with sincerity instead of irony.

maybe you had to get hurt by someone before you learned how to love them.

“All I know is I’ve never missed anything I didn’t love.”