The question is one of faith. Faith in my talent. Faith in my decisions. And faith in the idea that the truth, even if it can’t pay my bills, can still set me free.

I try to find meaning anywhere I can. It's the only way I know how to validate my existence.

He was waiting for something from me. Acknowledgement. Validation. Commiseration, perhaps. I couldn’t even look at him because I was afraid of feeling any more than I already did.

I would have remembered the good stuff. Nobody ever remembers the good stuff.

Personally, I don’t like inherently happy people. I don’t trust them. I think there’s something seriously wrong with anyone who isn’t at least a little let down by the world.

There are things we never tell anyone. We want to but we can't. So we write them down. Or we paint them. Or we sing about them. It's our only option. To remember. To attempt to discover the truth. Sometimes we do it to stay alive. These things, they live inside of us. They are the secrets we stash in our pockets and the weapons we carry like guns across our backs. And in the end we have to decide for ourselves when these things are worth fighting for, and when it's time to throw in the towel.

You know what I was thinking about on my way home? How different my life would be if you’d made that gash a little deeper. Or how different yours would be if I’d vaulted myself off a roof nine years ago. Do you ever think about things like that? Like, if either you or I wouldn’t have made it, where would the other one be right now? It was something I thought about all the time: how death changes every remaining moment for those still living.