Shaun David Hutchinson

While there are memories I wish I could dispose of, sometimes my memories are the only things that keep me sane.

I hate Jesse for leaving me behind. If he asked, I would have walked into the air with him.

We have to watch Nana's life slipping away from her like a forgotten word. I thought I understood what's happening to her, but this isn't like being robbed a penny at a time. Memories aren't currency to spend; they're us. Age isn't stealing from my grandmother; it's slowly unwinding her.

I was surrounded by heaven. The sun, the moon, the earth, and all those living stars. They wen't static like in pictures taken from impossibly far away- they breathed, they glowed. They were future and past, possibility and memory. They were beautiful. "I never knew there were so many," I whispered. We are merely pieces of a grander design, even more insignificant than I imagined. When the earth ceases to be, all those stars will shine on. Out deaths will mean nothing to them."I feel so small." No one replied. I wondered as I watched the stars, really seeing them for the fist time, whether they could see me, too.

A star's light still shines even if there's no one to see it, but without someone to remember Jesse, his light will disappear.

Sometimes when a star collapses, it becomes a fiery supernova, but other times the core density is so great that it quietly consumes itself, forming a black hole, its gravitational pull so terrible that nothing can escape, not even light.You can't see a black hole, but if you look closesly, you can witness its effect on those objects nearest to it - the way it changes the orbit of solar systems or draws off a star's light a little at a time, sucking it down to its dense center,Maybe we couldn't have stopped Jesse's collapse, but we should have seen it happening.

It begins when he__ still a man in a suit, doing the kinds of boring things that men in suits do. The things that no one writes about because they know that boys don__ really have nightmares about clowns or three-eyed tentacled beasts that rise from deep within volcanoes. When boys wake up screaming in the night, it__ because they know that, one day, they__l have to grow into men who wear suits and spend their days doing boring things that cause them to rot from within, so their skin withers and blackens and cracks, leaking out their juices until they finally lie decaying and putrid, forgotten by a world that deemed them unworthy of remembering.It begins there because it__ important to know that a superhero with no past began as a man with no future.

It was chance. A random series of events given meaning by somone desperate to prove there's a design to our lives. That the minutes and hours between our birth and death are ore than frantic moments of chaos. Because if that's all they are - if there are no rules governing our lives - then our entire existence is a meaningless farce.

There's an amazing world out there for you to discover, Henry Denton, but you have to be willing to discover yourself first.

No doesn't mean to Marcus what it means to those without money and a car.

That's the problem with memories: you can visit them but you can't live with them.

It's a date.""It's a cookie.""It's a cookie date.

History is just a way of keeping score, but it doesn't have to be who we are.

Milkshakes make the world seem less shitty.

Bonding over illegal drugs hadn't magically solved our problems,

The tallest slugger touched my forehead, and I ignited like a sparkler on the Fourth of July. Shards of dazzling light rippled under my skin. I was the constellation Grus. The Trifid Nebula. I was the Big Bang, expanding endlessly through time and space forever."I thought I was dying. That I was going to expire on a cold slab, trapped inside an UFO, my body filled with every light that had ever existed. I couldn't imagine a better way to die.

Just the perfect peace of nothingness. That's what I believed.

How ugly we must look to them, spilling light into every dark corner to push back the shadows, blinding ourselves to the true beauty of emptiness.