He wrote the future onto my face with his lips.

It is harder in many ways to live in the middle than at the edges. Much harder to interpret as you see fit, because then you have no assurance you are doing right in the eyes of God, no confidence you will be rewarded in the afterlife.

In order to know someone who is at some level unknowable, you must leave yourself wide open. If you don’t, you foreclose the possibility of learning something critical about this person you need, your parent, the person upon whom your survival depends. It’s like time-lapse photography; your lens at maximum aperture in order to capture something fleeting and elusive. The problem becomes one of calibration. How to protect yourself in the process. How to capture something without going blind.

I never expected to be happy, to have a sense of belonging somewhere. I didn’t grow up with a sense that this was possible or even desirable. I’m quite sure my parents didn’t either, so I come by this honestly.

Writing made it tolerable to be human in a way nothing else ever had. It gave me a place to thrive, to exorcise, to cultivate some understanding of aspects of being human that were otherwise confounding.

The velvet darkness of his face.

If someone eliminates the obstacles you believe to be in front of you, then you have no choice but to try. Fail spectacularly, if you will, but try.

But that is the thing about miracles: it is perception that determines them as such, not facts.

It is his absence that is part of me and has been for years. This is who I am, perhaps who we all are, keepers of the absent and the dead. It is the blessing and burden of being alive.

She asked me if Christmas was a particularly tense time and whether my father had ever hit my mother while trimming the tree. I couldn't remember anything like that happening, and although it seemed possible, I was suspicious when she asked me if my father had ever thrust the silver star at my mother to deliberately pierce her hand. I said "no" and she said "the bastard" and we both looked a little confused. (p. 9)