He removed several pages of death certificates, which were picked up by another breeze and sent into the trees. Some would fall with the leaves that September. Some would fall with the trees generations later.

It's true, I am afraid of dying. I am afraid of the world moving forward without me, of my absence going unnoticed, or worse, being some natural force propelling life on. Is it selfish? Am I such a bad person for dreaming of a world that ends when I do? I don't mean the world ending with respect to me, but every set of eyes closing with mine.

Why didn't he say goodbye? I gave myself a bruise. Why didn't he say 'I love you'?

But when, at the end of my sophomore year, I became a philosophy major and started doing my first seriously pretentious thinking, I became a vegetarian again. The kind of willful forgetting that I was sure meat eating required felt too paradoxical to the intellectual life I was trying to shape. I thought life could, should, and must conform to the mold of reason. You can imagine how annoying this made me.

And so it was when anyone tried to speak: their minds would become tangled in remembrance. Words became floods of thought with no beginning or end, and would drown the speaker before he could reach the life raft of the point he was trying to make. It was impossible to remember what one meant, what, after all of the words, was intended.

I saw Herschel and he saw me and we stood next to each other because that is what friends do in the presence of evil or love.

Ninety-eight percent of all the soy that's raised goes to livestock. So people make fun of vegetarians for being tofu eaters, but no one eats tofu like steak eaters, by a long shot. It's also funny that tofu is held up as what a vegetarian eats. I mean maybe I eat tofu once a month, but other than that, never. All of it, statistically speaking, is going to livestock.