“I looked around. This house only the night before had been a home, and serves as a storage locker for memories that I could barely remember and a bunch of things I'd rather forget.”

“I had to go to my locker before lunch." Actually, i didn't, but i'd used the excuse so i could walk past Noah's locker and steal a few seconds-okay, a few kisses-from him.”

“But there is room now in my heart for more memories, carved by a letting go that I could find only by coming home to a place I'd never been.”

“The day that I left my home, I had prayed that my children would forget me. I wanted to spare them the pain of remembering. But that night, as I crouched in the white mist, waiting, I knew more than anything that I wanted them to remember, I wanted desperately to go on living in someone's memory. If we are not remembered, we are more than dead, for it is as if we had never lived.”

“Jack had been a jerk that night, even though I tried not to remember that part. It felt like I wasn't missing him properly if I let myself remember how much I'd despised him sometimes. Instead I tried to remember what he looked like grinning and dirty in the driveway, though these days it felt more like I was remembering a memory of a memory of his smile instead of the smile itself. When I thought too hard about that, it made me feel weightless and untethered.”

“I'd sit in a circle and a bunch of people who'd been through as much shit as I had would look at me like I snuck into the club without paying the cover. And I'd feel like screaming and telling them that I had paid it the same as everyone else in the room, I just didn't feel like waving around my receipt.”