It was the first time someone had given me everything I wanted and asked for so little in return.

Was he coming to bury the hatchet? Was there a hatchet to even be buried? For some reason I started thinking of how weird it was that I would always be his son and he would always be my father, that there was nothing that could ever change. I didn’t know whether this permanence was comforting or terrifying.

Leave home. Fail marvelously, and succeed even better. Kick your feet up and wonder when you will be back. Stay out late. Make telephone calls from unfamiliar street corners. When your mother’s voice comes from far away and asks where you are, squint down the road and tell her you aren’t sure. Make uncertainty your home. Put the mat out for yourself. Look at your watch and think of how you’re almost home.

Getting older isn’t always about having fun,” he said. “In fact, in many ways it’s about being bored. It’s good if you can find a way to be entertained by your boredom.

I was vaguely worried about how they would cope with wandering the desert of adulthood without the other’s hand to hold, but then I remembered that they never appeared to give each other that much comfort in the first place, or at least if they had, those days were buried so far in the past that it was hard to consider them a meaningful part of their life.

Its hard to show people everything, you know? You never know what they’ll do with it once they have it.

Love. People threw that word around like carzy.

Sprawled out on the front lawn Looking up at an ordinary sky It could fall on me and somehow be The day I didn’t die.

Distance is meaningless. No one’s that far away unless they choose to be.

I looked in the mirror and stared at my reflection, until I was in the head-clearing trance that comes when you stare at something for a long time.