Lullabies for Little Criminals

by Heather O'Neill

As he shouted out all my favorite things, they seemed so cheap to me. They paled in comparison to my desire to be with him.

I figured that he was warm like that because he still had his mother’s love in him.

If you want to get a child to love you, then you should just go and hide in the closet for three or four hours. They get down on their knees and pray for you to return. That child will turn you into God. Lonely children probably wrote the Bible.

As I walked out into the evening, I wished that I was on drugs too. Oliver was a junkie and so he had more in common with my dad than I did. They would be eating dinner together in their stockinged feet. Just like they had known each other from the day they were born.

I don’t know why I was upset about not being an adult. It was right around the corner. Becoming a child again is what is impossible.

Some people wanted to feel this way, but I didn’t. This separation from feeling was Jules’s remedy to life. But I was going to have to find other things to make me feel good and confident in life. I was just going to have to start being my own person.

wished that they had told him at rehab that hanging out with me and dancing and eating sundaes and drinking Coke out of green-and-yellow teacups were all okay. I wish that they had told him that all that was not part of the junk addiction.

Sadness fit me like blue jeans. Sadness fit me like a hangman’s noose. It crawled on me like an electric blanket and it was hard to resist its warmth.

From the way that people have always talked about your heart being broken, it sort of seemed to be a one-time thing. Mine seemed to break all the time.

He said that when you are in love with someone, you want to follow them to the bathroom. He said love just makes you pathetic.

He must have thought that I was sad and sweet and vulnerable. But he had chosen wrong. I wasn’t like that at all. There was a part of me that was smart and original and nerdy too.

When death takes someone you know, he holds you and whispers all his secrets in your ear.

His compliments were like little cupcakes all lined up in a window. Each one made me a little stronger.