To find Margo Roth Spiegelman, you must become Margo Roth Spiegelman. And I had done many of the things she might have done: I had engineered a most unlikely prom coupling. I had quieted the hounds of caste warfare. I had come to feel comfortable inside the rat-infested haunted house where she did her best thinking. I had seen. I had listened. But I could not yet become the wounded person.

In the ensuing silence, I have time to contemplate the word cute— how dismissive it is, how it’s the equivalent of calling someone little, how it makes a person into a baby, how the word is a neon sign burning through the dark reading, “Feel Bad About Yourself.

I'm not sure if I'm depressed. I mean, I'm not exactly sad. But I'm not exactly happy either. I can laugh and joke and smile during the day, But sometimes when I'm alone at night I forget how to feel.

We do an epically bad job of acknowledging one another's work and checking our sources.

The sky is like a monochromatic contemporay painting, drawing me in its illusion of depth, pulling me up.

Some people don't understand the promises they're making when they make them," I said. "Right, of course. But you keep the promise anyway. That's what love is. Love is keeping the promise anyway.

People are such idiots. As if there's something wrong with being in love.