“Maybe that was why I adored horror movies and true crime. I identified with the villain, the foe, the outsider. I was always the person who didn’t belong.”

“But that was the hardest thing about death: the unrelenting march of time forward, away from the person you’ve lost.”

“The boy everyone sees but nobody knows is with the girl who everybody knows but nobody sees.”

“I thought—I want to go home. I want to be in a place that feels like home. Where that was, I did not know.”

“Grief, by contrast, is a private experience, unconstrained by ritual or time. Popular wisdom will tell you that it comes in stages—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance—and that may be true. But the Paleozoic era also came in stages—Cambrian, Ordovician, Silurian, Devonian, Carboniferous, Permian—and it lasted two hundred and ninety million years.”

“The ending is coming. I can feel it. I don’t know if I can take it this time. But then again, I say that every time and yet, every time I take it. And, I come back to her again for more. I will take whatever time I can get with her. I will do that for a lifetime. I will. I know that much about myself. She is my water. I can never get enough of her, and it appears that I will die trying to love her, to keep her, to hold her with me, even though our time together seems to evaporate so swiftly. It slips through our fingers so damn fast that we don’t even have time to savor it when we’re together.”

“The cherries on the ends of our cigarettes burned a bright orange against the surrounding shadows, like the stirring of embers, waiting for the phoenix to rise.”

“All right boys, let’s sail away! Show those bastards how airship pirates fly a ship!”