Goodbye Days

For the most part, you don't hold the people you love in your heart because they rescued you from drowning or pulled you from a burning house. Mostly you hold them in your heart because they save you, in a million quiet and perfect ways, from being alone.

I sometimes look at my bookshelf now and think about how someday I'm going to die without ever reading a lot of the books there. And one might be life-changingly good and I'll never know.

Funny how people move through this world leaving little pieces of their story with the people they meet, for them to carry. Makes you wonder what'd happen if all those people put their puzzle pieces together.

Sometimes, though, you want to remember every minute you spent with someone. You want to remember even the most mundane moments. You wish you had inhabited them more completely, and marked them with yourself more indelibly - not in spite of their ordinariness, but because of it. But you only discover this when it's too late

Our memories of our loved ones are the pearl we form around the grain of grief that causes us pain.

There comes a point when you realize that you can never make someone like you, or even stop hating you, and the only defense you have left is the ultimate one--not giving a shit anymore.

Grief is weird. It seems to come in these waves out of nowhere. One minute I'm standing in the ocean, fine. The next minute I'm drowning.

Be honest. Be humble. Listen more than you talk.

I think if what you'd do for your last day on Earth doesn't look like a pretty normal day for you, you probably need to reexamine your life.

When he was sad, he never used it as an occasion to make anyone else sad.

My mind twirls with mysteries. The eternities. Life. Death. I can't stop it. It's like staring in the mirror for too long or saying your name too many times and becoming disconnected from any sense of yourself. I begin to wonder if I'm even still alive; if I exist.

Night descends as a falling blanket. The city is a constellation of lights, each one representing a hand that turned the lightbulb. A hand attached to a mind containing a universe of memories and myths; a natural history of loves and wounds. Life everywhere. Pulsing, humming. A great wheel turning. A light blinks out here, one replaces it there. Always dying. Always living. We survive until we don’t. All of this ending and beginning is the only thing that is infinite.

Pareidolia. One of my favorite words. It's when your mind sees a pattern you recognize where there isn't one. Like seeing a face in the moon. or shapes in the clouds." Dr. Mendez smiles and says, mostly to himself, "Pareidolia. What a beautiful word." "For something that isn't always beautiful." "For something that isn't always beautiful.

A liquid rose-gold warmth— whatever color is on the opposite end of the spectrum from the color of aloneness—fils me briefly.

I guess guilt doesn't sleep, it only eats.

No one knows how anybody lives through anything. People just do.

Don't think that way," my mom says. "We need to think positively." How's this: I am positively fucked.

Weird how we're programmed to get pleasure from destroying ourselves.

I watch the tip of my tie sway to and fro and wonder how humans got to a place where we said, "Whoa. Hold on. Before I can take you seriously, you need to hang a brightly colored strip of narrow pointy cloth around your neck.

I should wait. I don't want to come off as a weirdo. But also I'm now keenly aware of how important it is to tell people what you want them to know while you can.

The universe - fate - is cruel and random. Things happen for many reasons. Things happen for no reason. To shoulder the burden of the universe's caprice is too much for anyone. And it's not fair to you.

The funny thing is that I never see the world any differently through new glasses. I only ever see things differently when I look in the mirror.

Now I'm standing here, writing the final chapter of my son's portion of the history of my life. I never imagined that my history would include the full history of my son, start to finish. But it does now.

I wish it would rain. Torrents. So hard it would cleanse me of worry and trouble; so hard it would lift the stain of death from me and carry it to the rivers and out the sea.

Out of nowhere, I'm taken up in an unnameable ecstasy. The kind that comes from no specific wellspring and overflows before you even knew it was building in you. Everything is so beautiful, so good, you feel like you don't even need to breathe air anymore.

I start laughing right there in line, laughing like I did then. Like I did so many times. Some days-the good ones-this is how they visit me.

I tell him I believe we are stories of breath and blood and memory and that some things never finally end.

I wonder if the actions we take and the words we speak are like throwing pebbles into a pond; they send ripples that extend farther out from the center until finally they break on the bank or disappear.

She laughs. A clean, bright, and silver sound, like wind chimes.