If he were less well trained, and less careful, he would say hate. But he can’t say it; it is too close to passion, and passion is too close to love, and love is amor deliria nervosa, the deadliest of all deadly things: It is the reason for the games of pretend, for the secret selves, for the spasms in the throat.

I cry for everything I abandoned and because I, too, have been left behind -- by Alex, by my mom, by time that has cut through our worlds and separated us.

And now I know why they invented words for love, why they had to: It's the only thing that can come close to describing what I feel in that moment, the baffling mixture of pain and pleasure and fear and joy, all running sharply through me at once.

Why couldn't you let me have it? Why did you have to take it? Why did you always take everything?

We're killers, all of us: We kill our lives, our past selves, the things that mattered. We bury them under slogans and excuses.

Amazing how hope lives. Without air or water, with hardly anything at all to nurture it.

That's the thing about best friends. That's what they do. They keep you from spinning off the edge.