To pretend to be calm is to be calm, in a way.

I am a cutter, you see. Also a snipper, a slicer, a carver, a jabber. I am a very special case. I have a purpose. My skin, you see, screams. It's covered with words - cook, cupcake, kitty, curls - as if a knife-wielding first-grader learned to write on my flesh. I sometimes, but only sometimes, laugh. Getting out of the bath and seeing, out of the corner of my eye, down the side of a leg: baby-doll. Pulling on a sweater, and in a flash of my wrist: harmful. Why these words?

I'd come to believe there was no food more depressing than Danish, a pastry that seemed stale upon arrival

I can't think of anything more crushing than slowly, over time, realizing exactly how wrong you were about someone.

To me, marriage is the ultimate mystery.

Safer to be feared than loved.

There are no really new stories anymore.