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Reading about these woo-woo things made Dizzy’s soul buzz and Dizzy wanted a buzzy soul. A buzzy everything.
She didn’t know people could stop loving you. She’d thought friendship was permanent, like matter.
Not that her family had ever watched anything in a happy people-pile or been that happy, period. But now there was no chance of it. She was going to die before all the chances.
the tattoo of the word destiny had been on the girl—“and
Dizzy wasted all the minutes. This was because time went faster for her than other people. How else to explain what happened when she went online? Or looked out a window? Or whatever.
Dizzy missed him, even though she’d never met him—it was like being thirsty, but always.
Well-known fact: Boys got to be sexy-ugly, not just ugly.
He was weird. He knew this. He suspected he was in the wrong body, family, town, species, that there’d been some big cosmic mix-up. Like maybe he was supposed to be a tree or a barn owl or a prime number. He only found himself, his real self, in novels, not even in the stories and characters, but in the sentences, the lone words.
Meaning: He felt guilty all the time of some unspecified crime, and like he was lying even when he wasn’t.
tattooed on the girl’s arms. There was true love and hummingbird and destiny.
A cool sentence: We were together, I forget the rest. And another: If the path before you is clear…but
‘If the path before you is clear’ ”—she did a ta-da with her hands—“ ‘you’re probably on someone else’s.’ Joseph Campbell.”
I wish you made me nuts. Maybe it’s my fault. Maybe it’s been too easy not to worry about you. My pillar.
Because tonight he was going to meet Destiny. Tonight would be his farewell to this Podunk town and
When he wasn’t playing violin, he’d get bored. Like pour-gasoline-down-his-mouth-and-light-a-match bored. And he’d get this hungry feeling too, life-hungry, life-ravenous. Then he’d do all the things he shouldn’t.
An assortment of fossilized daytime drunks was lined up, all of them fellow oblivion-seekers, fellow members of The Ravenous Tribe, spinning through days on barstools, waiting for nighttime, when the train that was real life finally pulled up to the station.
He was at the point in the night when the alcohol began drinking him.
California is a religion as much as a place, and we are practitioners, you see that, Cassidy?”
“He’s a violinist. I mean, that’s all he is. Most people are lots of things. He’s only one thing. He can’t live without playing.
He didn’t seem to realize he was talking to two extraterrestrials from Planet Terror.
It was always with him now—this inner tantrum. It had become elemental, along with the humiliation, which made his insides feel like they were curdling.
well, becoming for his mother what Wynton could never be: The one she didn’t have to worry about or even think about because he’d always do the right thing, the smart thing, the expected thing, and in this way, year after year, Miles Fall, whoever that was, whoever he might have been, began to disappear, to secretly unbloom.
By that time, he didn’t know how to be anyone but the anti-Wynton. He didn’t know how to be himself, or who that was, and even if he figured it out, he was afraid he’d be rejected, as he had been by his siblings.
singing at 963 Hz, called the frequency of divine harmony, aka “the God note,”
It’s the kind of memory you want to hang a hammock inside, so you can return to it in times like these and stretch out in it.
knows I feel tapped like a tree for sap and all the light is pouring out of me.
The problem was, even though she now hated Lizard with the force of the sun, she still loved him too. She didn’t know what people were supposed to do with the leftover love that no one wanted anymore.
Well-known fact: Life was a soggy sock you can’t take off.
There’s dignity in risk.
Would he have to learn how to be gay like he’d had to learn how to be Perfect Miles? Would he ever just be able to be himself? (With anyone other than Cassidy and Sandro.) Surely other people just were who they were, weren’t they?
became their secret code. If people bear the trauma of their ancestors, doesn’t it follow they also bear their rhapsodies? If there is generational pain passed down, mustn’t there also be generational joy? If there are family curses that drop through time, mustn’t there also be family blessings that do the same?
He’d never laughed like that before. Did people do this all the time? It had felt so much more intimate than what he’d only moments before conjured with him and Felix in the walk-in refrigerator. A door in Miles’s chest—one he hadn’t realized was there—swung open.
Do you follow your destiny or your heart when they aren’t one and the same? Which pull is stronger?
He was the object of a preposition, never the subject of the sentence that was his life. It was like he’d been in the closet about everything, not only being gay.
I think it’s possible to live our lives without believing in destiny, without feeling it at work in the choices we make, or the choices that are made for us. But it feels impossible to tell the story of our lives without it. Stories give our lives structure, and that structure is destiny.
So much of the time, I don’t feel like I’m there. I learn you can be sitting next to someone and be in different time zones. I learn you can unknow someone. And you can unknow yourself too.
She’s everything. She’s everyone. She’s me, I think. My only person. The only person.
Life was a terrible place to live.
You can tell when death is near people. You can see it on a face, hear it in a voice. It’s like grief is an exclusive club and members recognize each other as easily as if they were wearing name tags.
the difference between hard bop and West Coast jazz.
His father had found him, the real hiding him, deep inside a pile of his words. He’d crawled into Miles’s poem and pulled Miles out of it.
He rights me, like I was a painting hung crooked my whole life.
I’m that girl again. I think in this moment how maybe I’m always all the girls I’ve ever been, how the now-me is just all the old-mes thrown together.
What if he did? Did Felix want him too? He imagined them, the fury of finally, two boys colliding like planets.
