Seeing a picture of my tits online didn’t bother me as much as it should have. 

With snot running down my chin, weeping, I allowed myself to entertain the possibility that this key situation would go on forever.

I have to believe that what I am writing — what I am living through — means something.

There is no hotel breakfast. No air conditioning. No Tour Guide singing in the next room.

Bliss can flip into alienation and back into elation, adding to the teasing uncertainty of identity.

When you peed in the cup, Herman was behind you, watching.

‘Did you talk about capes,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ Mary said.

But I don’t even know what a collective is. And I can’t remember if he had tattoos.

One weird Halloween everybody dressed up as Elliott Smith.

like HFCA is kind of artless manipulation 
it’s not subtle
 

People keep saying that they can’t say anything but everyone is saying everything all the time. 

Finally, Mr. Mackey, the chair of the school’s English Department, delivered a rambling panegyric about the school’s depth of talented writers. I left my seat in the bleachers to fetch a Dr. Pepper from the vending machine.

Like many who quit drinking, my mother became a proselytizer for sobriety.

The other half was the memories of the end. The time Teddy had threatened to burn the only copy of my novel.

He struggles to come up with actions that give him a sense of joy or purpose when she is not around.

He says he feels like all his problems would be solved if he stopped going to that bar.

Things that make sense: plants, deer, video games, sushi, beer.

When she looks back at me, there’s a saturnine hopelessness in her eyes I understand too well.

He stole my Tupperware, the largest one in a glass Pyrex set.