I regret that it takes a life to learn how to live.

Sometimes I imagined stitching all of our little touches together. How many hundreds of thousands of fingers brushing against each other does it take to make love? Why does anyone ever make love?

I wanted to cry but I didn't, I probably should have cried, I should have drowned us there in the room ending our suffering.

"My insides don't match up with my outsides." "Do anyone's inside and outsides match up?" "I don't know. I'm only me." "Maybe that's what a person's personality is: the difference between the inside and the outside."

And here I am, instead of there. I'm sitting in this library, thousands of miles from my life, writing another letter I know I won't be able to send, no matter how hard I try and how much I want to. How did that boy making love behind that shed become this man writing this letter at this table?

August has passed, and yet summer continues by force to grow days. They sprout secretly between the chapters of the year, covertly included between its pages.

There are two kinds of sculptures. There's the kind that subtracts: Michelangelo starts with a block of marble and chips away. And then there is the kind that adds, building with clay, piling it on. The way I write novels is to keep piling on and piling on and piling on.