You had been a paper boy to me all these years - two dimensions as a character on the page and two different, but still flat, dimensions as a person. But that night you turned out to be real.

How about I call you when I finish this?” “But you don’t even have my phone number,” he said. “I strongly suspect you wrote it in the book.” He broke out into that goofy smile. “A nd you say we don’t know each other.

And then the line was quite but not dead. I almost felt like he was there in my room with me, but in a way it was better, like I was not in my room and he was not in his, but instead we were together in some invisible and tenuous third space that could only be visited on the phone.

It's almost as if the way you imagine my dead self says more about you than it says about either the person I was or the whatever I am now.

So dawn goes down today... Nothing gold can stay. -- Robert Frost

You can trust that caring, as a rule, ends poorly,” which is true. Caring doesn’t sometimes lead to misery. It always does.

I felt the unfairness of it, the inarguable injustice of loving someone who might have loved you back but can't due to deadness.