My mom says I'm destined to be the sort of man who uses big words but pronounces them incorrectly.

What passes for news is just morbid speculation or cartoonish screaming, followed by diaper commercials.

"I'm not going anywhere," she told me that night. But until we are old ladies-a cypress age, a Sawtooth age-I will continue to link arms with her, in public, in private, in a panic of love.

I think that's the real horror story for me, how little you can ever really know about your own motivations. How in the dark we all are about the concerns and the contents of our minds.

Madness, as I understood it from books, meant a person who was open to the high white whine of everything.

I do think there's something when you have an unbroken day, and it feels like you and your attention can just be together like birds again and you can actually think and dream a little.

No, I don’t have to tell a soul about this, I promised myself. When you are a kid, you don’t know yet that a secret, like an animal, can evolve. Like an animal, a secret can develop a self-preserving intelligence. Shaglike, mute and thick, a knowledge with a fur: your secret.