Good as Gone

This is why people need God—because people are awful, even the good ones.

Maybe once you've been left by the most important person in your life, you can never be unleft again. Maybe you're destined to be abandoned even by your own guts, maybe your foot walks off with your thighbone, why not, stranger things have happened.

I don't believe in the glory and the dream. I believe in statistics.

Maybe once you’ve been left by the most important person in your life, you can never be unleft again.

Somewhere deep down, I thought Julie was perfect. Now I wonder: Was I so afraid of finding out she wasn’t perfect that I almost killed her?   When

But there are laws of inevitability at work in our lives.

God too, had sacrificed his Son, Jesus. Always sons, never daughters. Were daughters too important? Or was it the opposite?

She could feel him taking in, for the first time, her lack of a coat, her lack of a purse. Now was the moment when he would also surmise, correctly, that he was buying her dinner.

If there is something missing—if I am afraid to love her quite as much as before—it is only because the potential for love feels so big and so intense that I fear I will disappear in the expression of it, that it will blow my skin away like clouds and I will be nothing.

most abducted children are taken by people they know;

there are laws of inevitability at work in our lives.

I remember when the grief was so potent I would lie on the sofa with the television on drinking vodka gimlets, one after the other, just waiting to pass out, staying as still as possible, teaching myself the art of numbness.

The worst doesn’t unhappen, but just like that, I am home.

I keep trying to find the before. But once something like that happens to you, there is no before anymore. It takes the before away.

How exciting to believe in your own ability to defy the world’s expectations of you even as you fulfill them, one cliché after another. I have spent my own life looking to my left and right and finding only the well-worn tracks of my own thoughts and behavior hemming me in.

What I should say is that it feels like all the parts of my body are going their separate ways. It feels like I am being abandoned by everything that has ever felt like a part of me. Maybe once you’ve been left by the most important person in your life, you can never be unleft again. Maybe you’re destined to be abandoned even by your own guts, maybe your foot walks off with your thighbone, why not, stranger things have happened.

The feeling of leaving: a perfect feeling, better than any safety in the world.

only superficially rebellious, on the level of hair dye.

My whole life, ever since I could remember, I’d always hated the thought that no one could ever know what anyone else was feeling or thinking. The fact that no one could ever be inside my head with me seemed like the loneliest thing in the world. I wanted so bad for there to be something that could make those boundaries just disappear. Something so big it was like air, a magic flowing across the planet, connecting everyone and everything.

Tom starts the engine, puts on his blinker, and forces the car out into the Houston traffic. He’s a wonderfully aggressive driver. When

I like to eat one half at a time, in case I want to take the rest home,” he said. “And I find triangles aesthetically pleasing.” “That’s