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Burning to be better is my favorite quality on anyone, and you are on fire
when I get to heaven, I will refuse to call it heaven if the people I love (who put me through hell) aren’t there.
My friend wakes up at noon. Goes to bed at eight. Wants less time because she wants less pain. I understand. I’ve been there too. I can spot a scar beneath a wristwatch from a hundred yards away. And no, it is not the weak who try to clock out early. It’s people who are desperate to go home.
To make up for lost time, you need only to put down the grudge you are holding so you can pick up the phone and say, How many days did we need each other at the same time without knowing it?
EVERY TIME I EVER SAID I WANT TO DIE —I meant I am willing to do anything to live. Even leave this world forever.
We need so much less than we take. We owe so much more than we give.
if your own story is one you aren’t sure you can survive, remove whatever sharpness you can from another person’s life.
I’ve watched it happen. I’ve watched someone’s body follow a loved one’s body to the other side. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever witnessed in my life, but it was the softest, too, one heart stopping to tell another heart, I’m coming with you.
Call it jealousy, but couldn’t it also be called faith? To believe there is always something better than you out there?
Everybody wants straight A’s. Give me some gay A’s to work for.* You’re talking to someone whose imaginary friends were bullies. You’re talking to someone who drank from the fountain after Connie McGary drank from the fountain and thought it might be my only real kiss. You’re talking to someone who wore a lifejacket to the baptism because I knew—I knew what they were trying to do. _________________________________ * My girlfriend tried to get me to edit this line out of the poem. Should I have listened to her? O yes O no
In the afterlife, I’ll apply for a job at a mistake factory. They’ll be awed by my résumé. If anything, I’m overqualified.
My grandparents have been married for sixty-three years, she told me, and a door in the center of her smile opened to a tiny Midwest church in 1944. At the end of the aisle—two kids, too young to know anything, were promising each other everything.
