Goldengrove

I waited for dawn, but only because I had forgotten how hard mornings were. For a second I'd be normal. Then came the dim awareness of something off, out of place. Then the truth came crashing down and that was it for the rest of the day. Sunlight was reproof. Shouldn't I feel better than I had in the dead of night.

The mystery of death, the riddle of how you could speak to someone and see them every day and then never again, was so impossible to fathom that of course we kept trying to figure it out, even when we were unconscious.

People see everything through the lens of their obsessions.

And there was that trick he did with time, making it speed up when we were together and drag til I saw him again.

You know who they wanted to play Rick?" Aaron asked. I shook my head. Why was I so tense? Didn't Aaron's question prove that we were just a couple of old-movie fans swapping Hollywood trivia gossip? "Ronald Reagan," said Aaron. "The worst president ever," I said. "You weren't born yet," he said. "What difference does that make?" I said.

She told me the French expression [Esprit de l'escalier]—the spirit of the staircase—for the voice that catches up with you, minutes after the fact, to make fun of whatever you said and come up with the perfect answer you didn't think of. We even had our own code phrase: SOS, we called it.

Little by little we surfaced from the dark gluey depths of that summer, bobbing into the blinding light we had to relearn how to breathe

Every song may be someone's personal implement of torture.