We Are All the Same in the Dark

Life is never yours. You are just renting it out while the landlord in the sky ups the price until you can’t pay anymore

In the dark, all that's left is our souls.

Natives often return, especially the ones who swear they never will.

Wouldn't you be happier if the thing that defined you to the world was not what you were missing?

The truth is, I’m not brave. I’m not even that willing. I’m just more afraid of one thing happening than the other.

Loving dark men is a seesaw. They never tell you everything. You always wonder if the tiny red spot on a shirt is really from a spaghetti dinner like they claim. But then they put a bird back in a nest. They pull a drowning kid out of the water. And that’s all it takes. The spaghetti is not blood.

Why do men have to kill beautiful things?

Moral high ground is a pleasant place to perch, even if the view turns about to be rather limited, in scope.

The avengers outside are the worst kind, the ones in silver cross necklaces, baseball caps, and Life is Good T-shirts. The ones who stay up until midnight to build their first-graders’ Alamo projects out of sugar cubes, cancel a Thanksgiving cruise to bring Grandma some turkey in the hospital, spend a full paycheck on ACL surgery for the family dog. Their love for God and family is just as manic as their hate.

We are all the same in the dark. My mother said that to me when she kissed me good night. She meant that in the dark, all that’s left is our souls.

The more I live, the more I binge Netflix and read overhyped novels, the more I think that knowing the ending is overrated, that the beginning and middle are enough. Answers aren’t going to change anything.

That said, this stretch of Texas road is all blue sky and endless pancake. I just listened to a couple of truckers at a diner down the road concur that this piece of Texas countertop proved the earth was flat, and that Donald Trump’s wall was thought up secretly to protect us from falling off.

I had plenty of hours to memorize every stroke of this da Vinci, down to the salt Judas knocked over, making it forever bad luck to spill salt. One of my uncle’s most effective sermons was called “Devil and Salt.” He preached that when you spill salt, the noise wakes the devil, who sleeps on your left shoulder. But if you throw a little extra salt over your shoulder, the devil is blinded.

It is a profound thing, to know a boy his whole life.

Money is everything. It is life. It is happiness. It is the kind of blind I want to be.

What’s coming is always unimaginable, and by that, I mean just that. It cannot be imagined. What’s coming never acts or behaves the way we think it will.

The river that ran by my Oklahoma trailer park was filthy with washed-off sins.

At the time, Trumanell’s father, Frank Branson, also missing, was suspect No. 1. His son, Wyatt, was No. 2. It had been twenty days. The local cops, far outnumbered, had the choice of pulling out guns and laying waste to the people they sat next to at church or standing back and watching their crime scene get destroyed

Imperfect pieces that when put together make something beautiful and original.

It’s a melancholy that makes my heart ache, like grief is rising up out of the soil for every dead thing that ever lived.

If everybody’s holes were as obvious as a missing body part, what would the word disabled even mean? Would we erase disabled from the dictionary? Would the word not even exist, because all of us are both broken and whole?

I saw a dried tear under a powerful microscope once. It looked like a black-and-white aerial view of an Oklahoma ranch, all water squiggles and sharp architecture lines. The teacher said our tears look different under microscopes, depending on whether they are happy or sad.

Her eyes are stuck on my DIY stick-and-poke tattoo, a lopsided heart, on the soft part of the back of my hand near my thumb. It’s impossible to hide. Bunny says she will pay to have it lasered off, but Mary is out there somewhere with one that almost matches. The night before she ran away, she did mine. Then I did hers. Some people who are apart like to remember they’re staring at the same moon. This blurry little blue heart is my and Mary’s moon.

How could he decide it was an F2 on sight alone? I’ve been through countless tornado warnings in my lifetime. Only one turned into the real thing. I was seven. It was a fat, shapeless blob that looked nothing like the perfectly drawn funnel on The Wizard of Oz. It was an F all right, and it stood for my aunt screaming fuck at the top of her lungs.

My mother tried to convince me a troubling sky was as beautiful as a clear one. She’d tell me, “We don’t have mountains down here—we have storm clouds.” She said they were a sign of spring, part of life, something to get used to. If a thing creates solid terror every time, you don’t get used to it.

It almost felt like somebody died when I learned Betty Crocker didn’t exist—that she was just a pleasant dream pulled together by a marketer. The death of Santa Claus was easier to take.

Pitying a girl for something wrong with her face is just one rung up from bullying her for it.

I don’t think all of these people are assholes—just that it’s way easier to see life through a screen.