This is where they failed, all those years back, he believes. In taking care of one another when tragedy struck. It broke them, broke them all.

I don’t think about Terry every day, anymore. And sometimes I’m stunned by that fact. It isn’t only the discomfort of disloyalty I feel, it’s the fact of utter disappearance after death. The idea that as loved as we may be, we may also be forgotten. If only for a day here and there.

I spent so much time thinking about regret. Regret and its accompanying conviction that there is a perfect, placid life, one’s own alternate existence, pristine and simple, existing in a neighboring reality in which certain turns in the road were never set upon. And it isn’t true. Any of it. I knew that. I had learned it. But it is an irresistible fantasy, if only because it implies we have some control over our fates.

My mother’s death... seemed so much the focal point of all personal history in our lives, it was as though time began for us when it stopped for her. Maybe this is what happens to everyone – not necessarily sudden deaths, but certain events that create distinct before and after lines, walls really, requiring a great effort to climb, discouraging doing so.

I had confessed fully-with all the misguided passion of one who believes that she is cleansing herself and forgets that she may be staining the listener.

It is autumn, mid-October, and the greens of our first encounter with this land have dressed up in fancy costume, orange, scarlet, yellow, to welcome us. It is almost too much to take in, all the beauty.

Sometimes life demands things of you, that just the fact of being alive means for allowing for possibilites that may be far from what you’d planned or even hoped.

The greatest happiness of life is the conviction that we are loved; loved for ourselves, or rather, loved in spite of ourselves. – VICTOR HUGO.

It’s unexpectedly painful to have become a pronoun.

My creativity isn't rooted in confidence. It grows from many things, no doubt, but chief among them is a deep, rebellious, and indeed almost hostile stance toward complacency- about anything. It feels like the enemy. And certainty? It closes doors. Ends discussions. Shuts other people out.