Meet Me in Paradise

Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?

The cruel thing about death is that you forget it happened. So you get the torturous experience of re-learning that your someone is gone again and again. It’s like being stabbed in the heart with a blunt object every time you think to tell them something, or reach for them, or dial their number by accident. And then you remember.

And if it’s not an everything love, the kind that keeps you tethered to earth and makes you fly at the same time, it’s better to be free.

It’s a special kind of torture when the one person you want when you’re lost in a black ocean is the very person who just blew up your boat.

Everything great is on the other side of fear.

She needs to see the sun turn a mountain gold. She needs to feel the sensation of having conquered something hard, and that means she’ll have to keep putting one foot in front of the other, even when she’s tired, even when she’s scared.

We’ve been all over the world together, seen such amazing things . . . and yet none of them are even in the same universe as you.

What makes you think any of us knows what they hell we're supposed to do? Most of the time, I don't have a clue. None of us do, not even Lucas Tsai- for all the credit you give him in that department. We're all just trying to do our best with what we've got.

Your dad said that you are the best man he knows. That you are honorable and brave, that anyone could trust you with her life. So I’m entrusting my sister to you. I am guessing you probably are thinking of setting this letter down and stepping away from it, like it’s a firework about to go off in your hand. Here’s the thing: fireworks, if handled properly, are just about the best thing to ever happen to the night sky since the stars and whatever asteroid is pummeling toward Earth right now.

It means, I'm so sorry. When I hold your hand, I can feel your heartbreak.

Because sometimes, when everything is going wrong and you don’t know what to do, you just want all the tequila.

guess you could always do a little light reading,” he said, holding up my copy of Ulysses. “I couldn’t get through this myself.” “I’ve been attempting to read it since college,” I admitted.

You’ve got a tense energy about you. Maybe it’s you. I mean, if the shoe fits . . .