“You will always be my always", he assured me.”

“You will always be my always.”

“I love you-I do-but I am afraid of making that love too important. Because you're always going to leave me, A. We can't deny it. You're always going to leave.”

“Without you I wouldn't have been able to contain the hate. I would have used it against myself. You're the one who helped me control it. My mind spun out to other things.But it always came back to you.”

“If you wanted to reassemble Elijah's afternoon, you could probably do it by stringing together all the photographs and all of the frames of videotape that he walks into. Always a passerby, he is immortalized and unknown.”

“I'm still upset with my mother, though. And scared.If you lose me, I remember her saying when I was little and we'd go to a department store, just let one of those salesladies know, and they will take you to where I can find you. Even though I'm seventeen, I guess I still thought this would always be true-- that there would always be that lost-and-found, and not the lost-and-still-lost that I am now trapped inside.”

“aloof, adj. It has always been my habit, ever since junior high school, to ask that question: “What are you thinking?” It is always an act of desperation, and I keep on asking, even though I know it will never work the way I want it to.”