My inner goddess is doing the merengue with some salsa moves.

I’ve always sort of preferred people who are not entirely likable.

These are all direct quotes, except every time they use a curse word, I'm going to use the name of a famous American poet: 'You Walt Whitman-ing, Edna St. Vincent Millay! Go Emily Dickinson your mom!' 'Thanks for the advice, you pathetic piece of E.E. Cummings, but I think I'm gonna pass.' 'You Robert Frost-ing Nikki Giovanni! Get a life, nerd. You're a virgin.' 'Hey bro, you need to go outside and get some fresh air into you. Or a girlfriend.' I need to get a girlfriend into me? I think that shows a fundamental lack of comprehension about how babies are made.

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.

Okay, maybe I'm not such a shitty writer. But I can't pull my ideas together, Van Houten. My thoughts are stars I can't fathom into constellations.

I was born into Bolívar's labyrinth, and so I must believe in the hope of Rabelais' Great Perhaps.

It is saying these things that keeps us from falling apart. And maybe by imagining these futures we can make them real, and maybe not, but either way we must imagine them. The light rushes out and floods in.