Why get stained when getting dirty is so much more fun

(P)eople’s good intentions can wind up putting us in boxes as confining as coffins.

In the calculus of feelings, you never really know how one person's absence will affect you more than another's.

Every morning I wake up and I tell myself this: It's just one day, one twenty-four-hour period to get yourself through. I don't know when exactly I started giving myself this daily pep talk--or why. It sounds like a twelve-step mantra and I'm not in Anything Anonymous, though to read some of the crap they write about me, you'd think I should be. I have the kind of life a lot of people would probably sell a kidney to just experience a bit of. But still, I find the need to remind myself of the temporariness of a day, to reassure myself that I got through yesterday, I'll get through today.

Willem, I suspect deep down you know exactly why you're here, exactly what you want, but you're unwilling to the wanting, let alone the having. Because both of those propositions are terrifying.

Hate me. Devastate me. Annihilate me. Re-create me. Re-create me. Won't you, won't you won't you re-create me.

I'm also starting to wonder something else. If maybe the point of this crazy quest I'm on wasn't to help me find Willem. Maybe it was to help me find someone else entirely.