It seemed like forever ago, like we've had this brief but still infinite forever. Some infinities are bigger than other infinities.

Someday no one will remember that she ever existed, I wrote in my notebook, and then, or that I did. Because memories fall apart, too. And then you're left with nothing, left not even with a ghost but with its shadow. In the beginning, she had haunted me, haunted my dreams, but even now, just weeks later, she was slipping away, falling apart in my memory and everyone else's, dying again.

I was surprised. I'd always associated belief in heaven with, frankly, a kind of intellectual disengagement. But Gus wasn't dumb.

She did not need to fold into herself and self-destruct. Those awful things are survivable, because we are as indestructible as we believe ourselves to be. When adults say, "Teenagers think the hate invincible," with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they don't know how right they are. We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken.

The phrase booze and mischief left me worrying I'd stumbled into what my mother referred to as "the wrong crowd," but for the wrong crowd, they both seemed awfully smart.

Half-drunk on well-creamed gas station coffee and the exhilarating loneliness of a freeway in nighttime.

This star won't go out. And it won't. we won't let it.