Vagabonds!

So, a boy stands, then kneels in a pool of moonlight at midnight in his parents’ garden, asking God to kill him for being him. Then he looks up and God says a decisive no with not just one, but all the beautiful mouths They have. That’s it, that’s the story. And the lesson, love, is this: If your own god keeps failing you, God can show you another.

What I will also say is that women are magicians. I don't mean magic like the kind you were warned to avoid, I mean magic as in spinning story as lifeline, as in turning a wound into a star, as in holding an apocalypse in your core and smiling believably.

In her anniversary card, Daisy wrote: If they say we don't exist, that they can't see us anywhere except rotten corners, in perverse bodies, how come I can see you and hold you and you're holy; how come I can love you and home you and you're there, in flesh, in my mind, in my blood; how come I keep waking up in this love and feel rested? What else to do now then, when a love like this finds you? What else but praise? What else but dance?

Books mattered, because girls who are at their most real in book pages are sometimes the only reason alive girls get through their years at all.

Then people can't look left or right the way they do. They can't mind other people's business. That's the point of the dream: What will people become if they have to mind their own business instead of other people's business? If they can't find others to hate, to kill, to target? What happens if light, music, drugs, sex, everything all disappears and all you have is you? Do you like you? Can you survive you?

Shame works, because there are those who we name when we talk power, but not when we talk harm.

Freedom will have to be imagined by the shapeshifters, actors, invisibles, ghosts, magicians, vagabonds, outcasts, outsiders. Always the only hope. I combed the country for as many as I could find and I watched them, for my own heart, for my own hope, for my own personal goings-on. Because that is my sustenance. I need hope the way people need blood, the way people need food. And they need, as we all do, somebody to see them, to bear them witness, to watch over them lovingly. So I did. And I do. I see them and I love them and I'm unashamed of my heart. They are my diamonds in the dust.

But look how we broke each other in the end. Who could have killed me better than you?

...because some books won't come directly to you; they go through someone who loves you.

Laws exist. Laws are for the poor. Laws are for the masses to the city. Laws are not for those who have the master key, know this. For every law made there are people under it and people who are above it.

Let's make sure that by the time the morning comes, it rises gently and with a humble heart, like it knows what we tried to do to the world tonight, what we changed in the air forever. Let it rise like it will never again forget that we were here.

But none of that mattered now, because dead people were, among other reliefs, largely exempt from their mother's wahala.

Adults break their own spirits all the time just to do what someone else said is the right thing, yes, but who is anyone to determine who someone else is?