You can't always be pushing people away. Someday nobody'll come back.

I think I'd rather have my heart broke than do the breaking. —Lena

You can't always be pushing people away. Someday nobody'll come back.

I rewrite my books until they're mostly memorized so that's a lot of rewrites, a lot of time spent with my stories.

I feel like so much of what I'm doing is making a road where there is no road and inviting people on that road with me. It's scary. It's scary, but I can't listen to the voices that are saying form is the only way, or that there is only this kind of form or that kind of form.

Where I grew up, it was all people who were black and Latino, people who look like me. Now I live in a neighborhood where very, very few people look like me.

I'm always wondering if he'll return. Sometimes I pray that he doesn't. And sometimes I hope he will. I wish on falling stars and eyelashes. Absence isn't solid the way death is. It's fluid, like language. And it hurts so much...so, so much.