Indiana,’ he said. ‘They steal the land from the Indians and leave the name, yes?

Late in the winter of my seventeenth year, my mother decided I was depressed, presumably because I rarely left the house, spent quite a lot of time in bed, read the same book over and over, ate infrequently, and devoted quite a bit of my abundant free time to thinking about death.

You can't just make yourself matter and then die, Alaska, because now I am irretrievably different.

I pointed at the little kids goading each other to jump from rib cage to shoulder and Gus answered just loud enough for me to hear over the din, 'Last time, I imagined myself as the kid. This time, the skeleton.

Maybe life is not about accomplishing some bullshit markers.

History doesn't have a curfew.

Such is life. We grow up. Planets like Tiny get new moons. Moons like me get new planets.