I have always been caught by the pull of the unremarkable, by the easily missed, infinitely nourishing beauty of the mundane.

We were still at the age when girls are years older than guy, and the guys grow up by doing their best when the girls need them to.

We had no one else to learn this from- none of our parents were shining examples of relationship success- so we learned this from each other: when someone you love needs you to, you can get a hold of your five-alarm temper, get a hold of the shapeless things that scare you senseless, act like an adult instead of the Cro-Magnon teenager you are, you can do a million things you never saw coming.

My memories of them had rubbed thin with overuse, worn to frail color transparencies flickering on the walls of my mind...

A bore or an uggo might manage not to get up anyone's nose, but if a girl's got brains and looks and personality, she's going to piss someone off, somewhere along the way.

Don't get discouraged if you're hammering away at a sentence or a paragraph or a chapter, and it keeps coming out wrong. You're allowed to get it wrong, as many times as you need to; you only need to get it right once.

But this is what I know about people getting ready to walk of the edge of their own lives: they want someone to know how they got there. Maybe they want to know that when they dissolve into earth and water, that last fragment will be saved, held in some corner of someone's mind; or maybe all they want is a chance to dump it pulsing and bloody into someone else's hands, so it won't weigh them down on the journey. They want to leave their stories behind. No one in all the world knows that better than I do.