“

“Like a sculptor, if necessary, carve a friend out of stone. Realize that your inner sight is blind and try to see a treasure in everyone.”

“

“Our motto is, when they go low, we go high.”

“

The words we bring to life on paper or from our lips, the timid and nervous confessions, the brittle anger that slips from our tongue, the lines of thanks, the good and the bad and the honest—this is what makes us real. This is what makes us connect to one another. This is what changes our lives.

“

Remember the girl you met in the library during that late winter evening. Remember the chewed up #2 pencil wedged carelessly amidst her bleached auburn hair and rusted locket she grasped so tightly with her delicate hand.

“

“God is cruel. Sometimes he makes you live.”

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I don’t know how I’m supposed to pretend you don’t turn my stomach into a butterfly mortuary, that they flew around so fast and frantic, all of them died. I’m a graveyard of everything I’ve ever said to you.

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We’d go on drives in your little red car. After enough of these trips, that little red car starts to feel like home.

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You craved normalcy. Simplicity. That comforting feeling like you finally belonged. But you never quite got there.

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Because some people, for some reason, stay with us. And maybe that’s okay.

“

I want to tell him it isn’t fair. He shouldn’t take up all this space reserved for important things like missing my father, or college papers, or anything.