“I remembered how is disheartening and dreadful when you're seeing it for the first time. I thought of my parents and the town where I was born, and suddenly everything around me seemed less real.”

“It was as if knowing that I had to leave revealed something to me that only [he] could explain. But everything felt wrong. In the dim-blue daybreak I began seeing the the entire world reversed and spinning through a deserted tunnel of falsity and sorrow.”

“Even the few days I spend reminiscing in Mexico City seem like memories or dreams. Everything looks different and backward without [him] and his uncertainties. I could have even stayed at the same hotels, in the same rooms even, yet would have never known the difference. Traffic and weather seem painted onto this dull grey canvas of highway, detached from any near past. Nietzsche calls it the separation of body and soul - the improbability of two separate worlds. I was incapable of fitting in anywhere. I was in search of expiation. I would never find it - it had never been there.”

“It seemed not only as though they had everything figured out but were balancing it in their palms as well. The world was borrowing its time from them in order for anything outside of their lives to take place.”

“I knew myself to be in need of not one solution of any caliber, but of an endless string of short-term remedies. Just as soon as I'd become acquainted with anything, it just as quickly became useless to me. ”

“I wanted to mend the entire world all at once, but in such longings found that I'd already caused too much harm.”

“This is another thing I think of, turning it over, try to put together two pictures of it, but this time it's about me, it's myself I'm trying to figure. Because one sounds so disgusting, not even able to tell Al about it, win the big game, take the virgin to her first bonfire, feed her a beer or two, and then the two of us in someone's car with your hand between my legs, unbuttoned and hiked down and the noises I made, before I finally, gasping, stopped you. It sounds terrible and it's probably the truth, the real picture, gross when I write it down and shamed about it. But it's the real, whole truth I'm trying to get down, how it happened, and honestly it felt different then, different from that bad picture. I can see it, so gentle the way you moved, the thrill that was there with us as no one knew where we were or what we were doing.”