And because love, real love, is not so easily shed.

It might interest you that just as the U.S. was ramping up its involvement in Vietnam, LBJ launched an illegal invasion of the Dominican Republic (April 28, 1965). (Santo Domingo was Iraq before Iraq was Iraq.)

You keep waiting for the heaviness to leave you. You keep waiting for the moment you never think about the ex again. It doesn't come.

She's sensitive, too. Takes to hurt the way water takes to paper.

I never hear white writers get asked, 'Do you worry about how you represent white people?'

...sometimes a start is all we ever get.

Then you look at her and smile a smile your dissembling face will remember until the day you die. Baby, you say, baby, this is part of my novel. This is how you lose her.