The Five Stages of Andrew Brawley

Chaos is an excuse for people who don't have the patience to see the patterns.

Love's more than holding hands and going to dances. It's two people who struggle to live, even when they should maybe both be dead. When one of them would be better off dead.

How do you move on from something like that?" How do you deal with losing all the people you love?" "You don't, she says. "Not like anyone expects you to." Grandma Brawely signs and rests the frame on the bed. 'Life goes on with or without you, and that's just the reality of it. You never move on, you just keep moving forward.

Being punished doesn't mean you should miss out on being loved.

Hospital walls have no memory. They would crumble under the weight of so much suffering. It's better that they forget.

They want to believe, but there are too many villains in the world and not enough heroes for anyone to truly buy into the scam that is hope.

Except he and I know that some pain burrows so deep, no narcotic can ever soothe it. It's etched on your bones. It hides in your marrow, like cancer. If the boy survives, the pain is a memory he won't want.

If death can cry, maybe we all have a chance for redemption.

It begins when he’s still a man in a suit, doing the kinds of boring things that men in suits do. The things that no one writes about because they know that boys don’t really have nightmares about clowns or three-eyed tentacled beasts that rise from deep within volcanoes. When boys wake up screaming in the night, it’s because they know that, one day, they’ll have to grow into men who wear suits and spend their days doing boring things that cause them to rot from within, so their skin withers and blackens and cracks, leaking out their juices until they finally lie decaying and putrid, forgotten by a world that deemed them unworthy of remembering. It begins there because it’s important to know that a superhero with no past began as a man with no future.

Sex is biological. Kissing is art.

I'm not sure if the Bible is a real book written by God or just a collection of stories for people who need help putting their hearts back together, but it's comforting, and I try not to think about it.

Sometimes I think of myself as a savior of the lost, a caretaker to the found.

I held on to the hope that one day I would grow up and have all the answers, just like my parents. As I look over at Arnold and then at Father Mike, I realize that adults are just as fucked as the rest of us. No one really grows up. No one unravels all of life's many mysteries. They just grow older and become better liars.

Only someone who cares could fake not caring so well.

It's like his parents are funneling years of their lives into Rusty so he'll get well sooner. But I think if that were possible, more children who got hurt would end up as orphans.

Because there's no way that anyone would give up on a child in less time than it takes to microwave popcorn.

The past is a cold place. No one deserves to be trapped there, no matter how terrible you believe your sins to be.

The world looks different when you're spinning. Colors run together in the most amazing ways, Everything bleeds into everything else, and you get this idea that maybe there are no differences between any of us. That if everyone everywhere spun, we'd all see that we're connected,

My mom loved me no matter what I did. [...] When I really screwed up, she'd tell me that she loved me but that she didn't like me very much at that moment. [...] I know that God or Fate or whatever is out there loves me, but I don't think he likes me very much.

I asked my father once why falling in love in such a big deal, and he told me that one day in love is worth a hundred days not in love. Maybe it's true. I don't know. I hope it's true.

Maybe hell is seeing the lost loved painted over the faces of the strangers we meet.

It's almost August, and the last swarm of lovebugs swirls around me, their tiny connected bodies a tragedy. They're born, they fuck, they die a horrific death splattered against an uncaring windshield. That's the cycle: The ones we love always die.

.... I didn't recognise the million little ways they expressed their love for each other. Like how my mom always bought my dad's favourite kind of cheese, Swiss, even though hers was Havarti. Like the way my dad forgot their wedding anniversary but remembered the songs that played on the radio the first time they kissed... My parents didn't buy each other fancy gifts or take expensive vacations or plan elaborate surprises. They were simple people who showed their love in minute ways every second of every day.

As I look up at Arnold and then at Father Mike, I realize that I was that adults are just as f***ed up as the rest of us. No one really grows up. No one unravels all of life’s many mysteries. They just grow older and become better liars.

Death and the officers will never reach me in time. Father Mike lunges forward, but it’s already too late. All my debts are now paid.

Good-bye, Rusty.” I stop at the door and look back. “Iloveyou.” Before my words hit him, I run.

If only I could go to him and take his hand and kiss his lips, maybe this would all be better, but I can’t. Or he won’t let me. “I hate those boys for making you feel like dying. They should’ve been the ones to burn.

I lit myself on fire, Drew. I stole a bottle of rubbing alcohol, and stole a lighter, and I lit myself on fire.