I find the title How to Be Good. Curious, I open it up. I’m disappointed to find it’s fiction.
there is something intriguing about knowing how things are going to turn out, but being constantly surprised about how they’ll get there.
I tell myself I’m fine on my own, but am I? No friends to fall back on, no relationships, no support. Left to my own devices, I have no devices.
I will take a new approach to death, because what is important about death is not the dead. It’s the living. Those of us left behind.
I let myself relax into the pattern of the recipe.
If you don’t know how to deal with emotion, other people’s feelings can hit you like a drug.
Heartbreak is stupid and impossible. Hearts don’t break. Hearts squeeze, they wrench, they ache, they shrivel. Hearts pull apart in wet chunks like canned tomatoes.
She’s not quite making sense, but no one does all the time.
This is home, it’s the only place I want to be, but at the same time everything familiar feels strange. It’s the same as it ever was except without the people who most belong here.
I love it,” I say. “So I learned it.” It’s an explanation that leaves a lot out. But I learned a long time ago that people don’t really want explanations.
But I can’t force everything into the arrangement I’d like. I can’t use denial to make everything simple.
I preferred to think of myself as a cat. If I think of my behavior as cat behavior instead of people behavior, it pretty much always makes sense.
His voice is muddy, that’s what it is. Dark and brown and muddy. A note to it like coffee left too long on the burner. And unsweetened, bitter chocolate. But there’s dirt in it too, deep, dark dirt, like the garden in October.