A Love Story Starring My Dead Best Friend

There was this girl,” I said. "l mean-” All of a sudden I felt flustered, and added, ”We were just friends.” ”No such thing.” ”We were.” ”Look. Despite what you may have heard, people have sex all the time with people they don't love, or particulary care about, or sometimes can't even stand. So why in the world do people say that it's just friends, like it doesn't mean as much, if you're not having sex? Real friendship is true and forever and with all your heart. It's not Relationship Lite.

We'd been twelve years old together. We'd shared the convictions that only twelve year olds can share, that love is simple and powerful and easy and inevitable.

I sat there in the darkness, with their skin clsoe to me, and I felt lifted up and wrapped with kindness. And very small, because I didn't deserve this, but small the way a mouse in its den is small: warm and safe and protected.

Didn't anyone ever teach you that it's easier to ask forgiveness than permission?

Not Pining," she admitted. "But I look at you and you're so...Awkward, and scruffy, and fearless, and just so intensely yourself, and I remember why I fell so hard for you. And in another universe, who knows?

Poems are not for explaining," she said, her tone as bored and faintly scornful as his. "They are for pretty girls to read aloud. Everyone knows that.

I had always been blithely convinced that if I followed the side roads for long enough I’d trip over something wonderful, that thing you never know you’re looking for until you land on it that suddenly makes the universe a much bigger place than it ever had been before.

I didn’t believe that God told some guy, however many thousands of years ago, “Hey, build a ginormous boat in this desert over here.” I liked it as a story, though, because it seemed like the kind of thing God ought to say. There were crazy stupid things that needed to get done, or should have gotten done, or turned out to be wonderful when they did get done. And maybe, if God ever did tell people what to do, it was to stick up for these crazy stupid things that no one in their right mind would ever do otherwise.