Love is the most common miracle.

I thought being an adult meant knowing what you believe, but that has not been my experience.

It's bad for your brain not to unplug.

We are all going, I thought, and it applies to turtles and turtlenecks, Alaska the girl and Alaska the place, because nothing can last, not even the earth itself. The Buddha said that suffering was caused by desire, we'd learned, and that the cessation of desire meant the cessation of suffering. When you stopped wishing things wouldn't fall apart, you'd stop suffering when they did.

She smiled with all the delight of a kid on Christmas morning and said, "Y'all smoke to enjoy it. I smoke to die." - Alaska

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.

What a treacherous thing to believe that a person is more than a person.