“A life, even half of one, is so much to consider. I’ve always been bad with time, it unfolds before me in a kaleidoscopic blur.”

“The stadium erupts in applause. I clap my hands together and smile. I’m with my friends, and I’m with a sea of strangers.”

“I am thousands of miles long. I am shrinking. As I recede from the sky, the crescent returns to the moon. I am pressing into human proportion.”

“You exist in shared time with some people—call it love. There is no going forward, no going back.”

“She was enamored, entranced. In the mirror, she was powerful, graceful, not feminine, but femininity itself. Was she real?”

“My shadow made a human-shaped hole in the images. A negative space. My head hurt. I wanted to capture everything we were to each other, see if those distant years meant anything.”

“I dream myself normal and wake up strange. I dream myself strange and wake up stranger still.“

“She says she doesn’t want to talk about the disappearance. Anything but that is fine.”

“You might never meet a single other person in the dark. This she knew. So she took a chance.”

“Driving around, looking for a hotel for the night, we’d queued up the album to celebrate, sang along to every song together, transforming ourselves into echoes of who we used to be.”

“I would tell you how I saw so many brilliant things that year, things that felt like greeting cards from the void.”

“Dis-moi tout was all she heard now when she called them, the wasp that buzzed around the edges of every conversation: how, why, what now.”

“It was like being put in a painting you couldn’t escape. Everyone just stopped and stared at its beauty and strangeness.”

“The frost had lifted the road into a weird undulation that made us drive slow. I felt like a warped record. Some of the hours sped by and the others lagged, and our voices grew low and warbled and strange.”

“We were alone in the dark house and our dads were all gone. We sat on the floor like a pile.”

“Just about everyone I know has been doing little more than just splitting the difference between life and death.”