What I really want to do is say that life is impossible, and the lie we tell ourselves is that it is too short. Life, if anything, is too long. We accumulate too much along the way. Too many heartbreaks, too many funerals, too many physical setbacks. It’s a miracle any of us survive at all.

It’s in the spirit of male loneliness to imagine that someone has to suffer for it.

It isn’t hard to sell people on optimism, but it’s hard to keep them sold on it, especially in a cynical year.

There is something about setting eyes on the people who hold you up instead of simply imagining them.

The soundtrack to grief isn’t always as dark as the grief itself. Sometimes what we need is something to make the grief seem small, even when you know it’s a lie.

I am telling you all of this to let you know that I, too, want to feel the heat with somebody or, at worst, I want to be a child of the heat’s eager production, the smoke that rises & dances thick in the air, a ghost over those who labor in our names & then become the ghosts themselves & it’s a shame our wings don’t arrive until after we’ve already

Inside Terminal 5, under the spell of Carly Rae Jepsen, love is simply love. It is not war. It is not something you are thrown into and forced to survive. It is something you experience, and if you’re lucky enough, time slows down. It is not as fashionable as our precious American anguish, our feelings that eclipse all else. But, then again, there

but what I’m learning more and more as I go on is that my grief isn’t special beyond the fact that it’s mine, that I know the inner workings of it more than I know yours.

We’ve run out of ways to weaponize sadness, and so it becomes an actual weapon.