That's the question, isn't it?" you said one night. "Does death bring freedom, or is it the end of freedom?

But I had a feeling I wasn't supposed to find her that way. She was not a needle. This was not a haystack. We were people, and people had ways of finding each other.

Even if neither of us got what we wanted, we found freedom in the third choices.

What a horrible feeling that is, to know that if the disease [AIDS] had primarily affected PTA presidents, or priests, or white teenage girls, the epidemic would have been ended years earlier, and tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of lives would have been saved.

Why do we even bother? Why do we make ourselves so open to such easy damage? Is it all loneliness? Is it all fear? Or is it just to experience those narcotic moments of belonging with someone else?

All I get is tomorrow.

That's the question, isn't it?" you said one night. "Does death bring freedom, or is it the end of freedom?