The Shards: A novel

began engaging in flirtatious ways that I thought I wasn’t quite worthy of. But looking at photos of myself from that senior year I now realize I actually was cute enough to warrant their attention,

If you want to keep a secret you must also hide it from yourself.

I had to pull myself together and care more.

I made this connection and though it was tenuous I was haunted by it. And since I felt so alone that day it became a friend.

MANY YEARS AGO I REALIZED THAT A BOOK, a novel, is a dream that asks itself to be written in the same way we fall in love with someone: the dream becomes impossible to resist, there’s nothing you can do about it, you finally give in and succumb even if your instincts tell you to run the other way because this could be, in the end, a dangerous game—

And I wanted to write like this as well: numbness as a feeling, numbness as a motivation, numbness as the reason to exist, numbness as ecstasy.

The day really became effortless once you faked it and it actually became more real because of your changed demeanor; the act became the reality and it affected everything in what seemed like a positive way. In fact, it was preferable to reality.

I’d checked out sometime during my junior year and was performing a pantomime in which I only noticed the edges of things,

And I just stood there in the fading afternoon light, realizing at seventeen that I was already staring into my past—that the past had a meaning that would always define you.