But hope got in, no matter how hard and fast I tried to stomp it out. Like these tiny fire ants we used to get in Portland. No matter how fast you liked them, there were always more, a steady stream of them, resistant, ever-multiplying. Maybe, the hope said. Maybe.

Requiem has been controversial because people dont feel I gave it closure.

Mistake, mistake, mistake. A strange word: stinging, somehow.

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

I shiver, thinking how easy it is to be totally wrong about people-to see one tiny part of them and confuse it for the whole, to see the cause and think it's the effect or vice versa

That's when you realize that most of it-life, the relentless mechanism of existing-isn't about you. It doesn't include you at all. It will thrust onward even after you've jumped the edge. Even after you're dead.

Everything I see and touch reminds me of him, and so everything I see and touch is perfect.