“She said to embrace each change as if it were a small death.”

“That I should just dive in and let my world fall apart and rebuild itself. That if I can embrace change, I can embrace death, and that is the secret to liberation.”

“It had rained, she said, and I imagined the beads of small water on the windshield like a thousand eyes, or each drop a small imperfect reflection of a perfect moment.”

“It is said that each time we embrace someone warmly, we gain an extra day of life. So please embrace me now.”

“In idyllic small towns I sometimes see teenagers looking out of place in their garb of desperation, the leftover tatters and stains and slashes of the fashion of my youth. For this phase of their life, the underworld is their true home, and in the grit and underbelly of a city they could find something that approximates it. Even the internal clock of adolescents changes, making them nocturnal creatures for at least a few years. All through childhood you grow toward life and then in adolescence, at the height of life, you begin to grow toward death. This fatality is felt as an enlargement to be welcomed and embraced, for the young in this culture enter adulthood as a prison, and death reassures them that there are exits. “I have been half in love with easeful death,” said Keats who died at twenty-six and so were we, though the death we were in love with was only an idea then.”

“She said she thought there were different ways of loving someone, and there were some she used to think were the most important, and now she had changed her mind.”