Everything that could have possibly budged already had, anything neglectable was long ago done so.

The guy on the podcast had cancer, he was dying –every day he was dying a little bit more – and he was reflecting on being a literary agent.

Mama was a truck. A Ford Bronco, to be exact.

Bill looked like a hundred people I’d taken rides from: flannel shirt, sunburned, open-air Jeep, someone resigned enough to take on a hitchhiker and think, if you pull a knife on me in the next mile, I can live with that.

even when I’m sure it’s polyester, and the silk is one more kiss you trail across my body and say,

"Six fine fish in that dirty pond! They're gonna die there anyway!" he told me. "They're gonna suffocate on all that mud."

She said: in my home, I want to feel at home. I want to feel as though I am swaddled in blanket, as though the walls pump food right to my gut. I water the plants, all seven or eight, some dying. I feed the cat

The first time I met Courtney, she told me she loved my ballet flats. We were wearing the same $14.99 shoes. She hated her curly hair and middle name and Democrats.

and two... more

All my friends refer to my housemates as “the LCs,” short for the Lapsed Christians, because Bridget and Jeff met in Minnesota at some evangelist college where they started fucking and eventually got expelled. My friends find them fascinating.

His fullest attention. No one gets that. And here it is, steered onto me.

1. Driving east on I-94 from 8:41 to 8:55 I saw brief glimpses of beauty.

Recently, my dreams have had subtitles. But they never match the words being spoken. For instance, in the dream I’ll say, “I’ve missed you,” and the subtitles will say I DO NOT WANT THE SALAD.

“Don’t flatter yourself,” I said, turning to the man in the seat beside me. Though he didn’t appear to speak English, he intuited my rejection. Loneliness, like love, is an international language.

The top of Yoda’s house looked like it had been splattered with molded yogurt. There was an allure to it. Like, had he intended to paint it this odd assortment of colors, he would be proud of it.

In her dance, Chang’e waves her sleeves to disperse the surrounding mist.

He couldn’t yet do the thing he’d learned to, of establishing some authority by playfully, sweetly infantilizing her. By appealing to the equalizing, mutual infantilization of early love baby talk.

NO BOOKS, NOTES, OR ELECTRONIC DEVICES ALLOWED.

I was at a party, one of those parties where everyone is drinking heavily, like they are trying to accomplish something. Me, I was trying... more

She took off her heavy fake fur coat and placed it on my new white Ikea chair in the corner.

What does it mean to believe?

The first dog barks. Second dog. First dog. Third dog joins in. Then a fourth. Then a cacophony and I lose track of the dogs barking in a distance, down the quiet street where my father and I have nothing left to say to one another. 

When my wife drives off without me, my first thought is that she must have made a mistake.

All the tigers met at a restaurant. In the wild, they would have hunted in isolation, but territories had gotten smaller and old cats had to learn new tricks.

I think about cataloguing all the days I feel like dying. But then I think Ivan would find the death catalog. Ivan would use it against me.