I bet you could sometimes find all the mysteries of the universe in someone’s hand.
How could I have ever been ashamed of loving Dante Quintana?
Rafael?””Yeah?”„Do we all have monsters?”„Yes.”„Why does God give us so many monsters?”„You want to know my theory?”„Sure.”„I think it’s other people who give us monsters. Maybe God doesn’t have anything to do with it.
Summertime. It was a song. It was a season. I wondered if that season would ever live inside of me.
The day he came home from the hospital, he cried. I held him. I thought he would never stop.I knew that a part of him would never be the same.They cracked more than his ribs.
You can’t expect to go both ways when you’re driving on a one-way street.
It started to rain and we just sat. Sat and watched the rain in silence.
Ad we interviewing each other?Something like that.What position am I applying for?Best friend.I thought I already had the job.Don’t be so sure, you arrogant son of a bitch.
Everyone was always becoming someone else.Sometimes, when you were older, you became someone younger. And me, I felt old. How can aguy who’s about to turn seventeen feel old?
Life was like that- there would always be something scratching at the door. And whatever was scratching would just scratch and scratch until you opened the door.
I was getting an A for work. But not for talent. The story of my life.
Another secret of the universe: Sometimes pain was like a storm that came out of nowhere. The clearest summer could end in a downpour. Could end in lightning and thunder.
For the music to be over so soon. For the music to be over when it had just begun. That was really sad.
Maybe it wasn’t a good idea to rank the people in your life. That’s not how the heart worked. The heart didn’t make lists.
The problem is not that I don’t love my mother and father. The problem is that I don’t know how to love them.
Maybe all that silence about my brother did something to me. I think it did. Not talking can make a guy pretty lonely
Someday, I’m going to have to break some of your rules, Mom.””I know,” she said. “Try to do it behind my back, will you?¨You can bet on that, Mom.¨We both sat there and laughed.
One summer night I fell asleep hoping the world would be different when I woke. In the morning, when I opened my eyes, the world was the same.
I mean, when do we start feeling like the world belongs to us?I wanted to tell him that the world would never belong to us. ‘I don’t know’, I said. ‘Tomorrow.
I thought masturbating was embarassing. I didn’t even know why. It just was. It was like having sex with yourself. Having sex with yourself was really weird. Autoeroticism.
Words could be like food – they felt like something in your mouth. They tasted like something.
We’d been so sure of ourselves, but now we were lost.
See, the thing about that word, Sharkey, the F-word, is that sometimes I make that word do too much work. I mean, I say that word as if it clearly articulates what I’m really feeling. And it doesn’t. It’s a shortcut.
I wanted to tell her happy was hard for me. But I think she already knew that.
Do you think it will always be this way?”“What?”“I mean, when do we start feeling like the world belongs to us?”I wanted to tell him that the world would never belong to us. “I don’t know,” I said. “Tomorrow.
The problem with my life was that it was someone else’s idea.
Wow, a world without darkness. How beautiful was that?
I wish I didn’t have a heart that God wrote Sad on.
But the thing is, I didn’t make my friends happy and they didn’t make me happy. All we did was get stoned out of our minds. That didn’t have anything to do with happiness.
So I was the son of a man who had Vietnam living inside him. Yeah I had all kinds of reasons for feeling sorry for myself. Being fifteen didn’t help. Sometimes I thought that being fifteen was the worst tragedy of all.
All I knew is that sometimes my father was sad. I hated that he was sad. It made me sad too. I didn’t like sad.
I decided that maybe we left each other alone too much. Leaving each other alone was killing us.
Dad? Dad, no. No. I can’t. I can’t. Why are you saying these things?””Because I can’t stand watching all that loneliness that lives inside you.
I’m not a good kid. Yeah, look, I’m just a piece of paper with the word sad and a bunch of cuss words written on it.A lousy piece of paper. That’s me.A piece of paper that’s waiting to be torn up.
What did being connected to the world get you? It got you sadder. Look, the world is not sane. If you stay connected to an insane world, well, you just go crazy. This is not a complicated theory. It’s just simple logic.
And prayer? How could you pray to a God you wanted to hit?
..they were always asking me lots of questions. Questions I didn’t want to answer. They wanted to get to know me. Yeah, well, I wasn’t interested in being known. I wanted to buy a t-shirt that read: I AM UNKNOWNABLE.
I live in an ecotone. Employment must coexist with goofing off. Responsibility must coexist with irresponsibility.
I didn’t think it was my job to accept what everyone said I was and who I should be.
I couldn’t exactly storm away in anger. I’d just have to close my eyes and shut out the universe.
See, this is the way I see it. Not all anger is the same. Because there are different kids of anger. And you know what else – sometimes, anger is a virtue. As long as you’re not making someone bleed.
I thought of what my mom had said. “You talk like a man.” It was easier to talk like a man than to be one.
The problem with trying hard not to think about something was that you thought about it even more.
I wondered if my smile was as big as hers. Maybe as big. But not as beautiful.
Some boys… Are perfect shits. & other boys are very, very beautiful.
I’d rather have a cup of coffee and a cigarette than live in all that honesty.
I wanted to close my eyes and let the silence swallow me whole.
I guess I did miss Dante-even though I tried hard to not think about him. The problem with trying hard not to think about something was that you thought about it even more.
Breakfast seemed to be a good time for throwing your emotions around. Jodie said that at this place emotions were like Frisbees – people just tossed them around all day long like they were at a park.
No wonder I stopped keeping a journal. It was like keeping a record of my own stupidity. Why would I want to do that? Why would I want to remind myself what an asshole I was?
Try it again,” I said. “Kiss me.””No,” he said.”Kis
I wished it was raining,” he said.”I don’t need the rain,” I said. “I need you.
I wanted to buy a T-shirt that read: I AM UNKNOWABLE.
The sky was almost black and then it started hailing. It was so beautiful and scary, I wondered about the science of storms and how sometimes it seemed that a storm wanted to break the world and how the world refused to break.
I wondered how that felt, to really like yourself. And I wondered why some people didn’t like themselves and others did. Maybe that’s just the way it was.
I had to be the world’s biggest loser, writing about hair, and stuff about my body. No wonder I stopped keeping a journal. It was like keeping a record of my own stupidity. Why would I want to do that?
You’re fighting this war in the worst way possible.” “I don’t know how to fight it, Dad.””You should ask for help,” he said.”I don’t know how to do that, either.
I wondered what it would be like, to love a girl, to know how a girl thinks, to see the world through a girl’s eyes. Maybe they knew more than boys. Maybe they understood things that boys could never understand.
The thing about tears is that they can be as quiet as a cloud floating across the desert sky.
Water was something he loved, something he respected. He understood its beauty and its dangers. He talked about swimming as if it were a way of life.
He tried not to laugh, but he wasn’t good at controlling all the laughter that lived inside of him.
The summer sun was not meant for boys like me. Boys like me belonged to the rain.
I wonder if he’d been as beautiful as Dante. And I wondered why I thought that.
You know what the worst thing about adults is? …They’re not always adults. But that’s what I like about them.
I was ashamed of myself for being ashamed of myself. I didn’t like feeling like that.
When I was a boy, I used to wake up thinking that the world was ending.
Did you hear me, Zach? I care about you.” “Okay,” I said. “It’s okay with me that you care about me. But can we please not talk about it? Would that be okay with you?” “Yeah, that would be okay,” he said.
The heart can get really cold if all you’ve known is winter.
Summer was a book of hope. That’s why I loved and hated summers. Because they made me want to believe.
What is it with you and that book?”Rafael laughed. “We have a personal relationship.
Adam says I isolate. He is addicted to telling me that I spend too much time in my head. It’s an unhealthy behavior. Look, I don’t see how not bothering other people with your screwed-up vision of the world constitutes unhealthy behavior.
One of my roommates, Rafael, he’s an expert on monsters. Not that he talks about them. I can just tell. People who have monsters recognize each other. They know each other without even saying a word.
People who have monsters recognize each other. They know each other without even saying a word.