The Inexplicable Logic of My Life

by Benjamin Alire Sáenz

I liked keeping it calm. I guess I had this control thing over myself. But sometimes I felt as if I weren’t doing any living at all.

Still, that feeling rattled me because I wanted things to stay the same—​I liked my life just fine. If things could always be the way they were now. If only.

Okay, the thing with me is that I was a worrier. I hated that about me.

I had something in me that scared me.

“Maybe we don’t always know what we have inside us.”

Sometimes I was full of halfhearted yeahs.

“People can be cruel. People hate what they don’t understand.”

But we have to find a way to discipline our hearts so that their cruelty doesn’t turn us into hurt animals.

Not everyone who walks around on two legs is good and decent. Not everyone who walks on two legs knows how to use their intelligence.

The other thing about tears is that they kind of my made my heart hurt. Ouch.

“Everybody matters.”

But, see, it’s not where I come from that matters—​it’s where I’m going.”

Nothing just happens.

I guess God did a lot of giving. But He did a lot of taking, too.

“I don’t think it really matters if your best friend is a boy or a girl. As long as you have a best friend.

When is the right time for anything? Who knows? Living is an art, not a science.

I was thinking that I didn’t really want to grow up. But I didn’t really have a choice.

I guess life hurt everybody. I didn’t understand the logic of this thing we called living. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to.

It’s like she could see past their rough exteriors and see the parts of them that hurt. Maybe she thought she could take away the hurt. She was wrong, of course. But I found it hard to fault her for her good heart.

“I told you that there were only two things you needed to learn in life. You needed to learn how to forgive. And you needed to learn how to be happy.”

I wanted to hold on to her and never let go. But I was going to have to let go. And that hurt. Why does it hurt when you love someone? What is it with the human heart? What was it with my heart?

We’re all somebody.

It wasn’t always going to be morning, and darkness would come around again. The sun would rise, and then the sun would set. And there you were in the darkness again.

it’s not other people who make you feel like you’re alone. You do it to yourself.”

“Don’t ever underestimate the people who love you.”

“I know you sometimes think that people are like books. But our lives don’t have neat logical plots, and we don’t always say beautiful, intelligent things like the characters in a novel. That’s not the way life is.

A lot of people in the world had really shitty lives, and it wasn’t even their fault.

I pointed to my heart and tapped on it. “Because you have a lot of this. That’s all it takes.”

“Wouldn’t it be great, Sally, if we could just push the delete button in our brains and forget the times somebody hurt us?”

Sometimes there were moments when time didn’t exist. Or maybe it did exist, but, well, it just didn’t matter.

I felt alone again. I didn’t feel like being alone. I knew I’d start thinking about things. Shit.

“That’s not good. When I get to thinking, I wind up in a bad place.”

As I sat there and looked up at all the stars, I felt really, really small.

I was trembling, and crying too—​though I didn’t know why I was crying. Yes, I did know. I was scared. I was so scared. And I couldn’t stand it. That the hurt in Sam was so bad.

“I want to sleep forever.”

It was time for me to grow up—​even though I had always wanted things to stay the same. I wasn’t in charge of the world around me.

People say all kinds of things to try to explain what they can’t explain.

I knew why people were afraid of the future. Because the future wasn’t going to look like the past. That was really scary.