contemporary

We don't really change. We finally begin to live a life that is true to our values.

Happiness & Sadness are two contemporary stages in life. A wise man overcomes sadness with his wisdom, and a foolish man faces it with tears.

I can't stop thinking about what he felt like against my body, against my lips. I can't remember anything else, anything before that. And I realize in this moment that I've finally done it. That horrible, awful thing I swore I would never do.The frosting. The cigarettes. The blue glass triangle. The shooting stars. The taste of his mouth on mine in the hall closet. Gone. All I can think about is Sam. Matt is _ erased. My whole body is warm and buzzing. Sam is smiling next to me, because of me. And I've never felt so lonely in all my life.

Forgivenesss: It's a miracle drug. It's God's miracle drug.

If love is like a possession, maybe my letter are like my exorcisms

He nibbled on my lower lip again and pulled away, his breathing loud and labored. I opened my eyes and met two blue orbs so dark with desire that it almost made me lose all train of thought and strip naked. His lips were red and a little swollen from our kiss. And I'd be damned if I didn't want to nibble on his lower lip, too.

He tilted my head up with his index finger. Tingles spread on my skin. "Pain, obstacles, betrayal and all shitty things that happen in life shape everyone, just as much as good things do. Don't regret anything if in the end you can say you're an amazing woman.

I looked in the mirror and realized that I was already dead. I let you kill me one piece at a time, starting when I was, what? Eight years old? Nine? You killed yourself and then you came after us.

And you never fall behind?___f course I do. But I always feel guilty when that happens. After all, my journal is the oldest and most loyal friend I have. And it never interrupts me when I__ speaking,_ he added, with a boyish grin.

Before I could respond, I looked out the window again and as if in response to my thoughts, I saw Cooper walking up my driveway. My jaw dropped. I peeked around the kitchen doorframe. Mom was still lost to the television. I turned and looked out the window to make sure I wasn__ hallucinating. No, it was really him. And he had a horse walking beside him. How clichéd could it get?

This person has hoped and dreamed and now it is really happening and this person can hardly believe it. But believing is not an issue here, the time for faith and fantasy is over, it is really really happening. It involves stepping forward and bowing. Possibly there is some kneeling, such as when one is knighted. One is almost never knighted. But this person may kneel and receive a tap on each shoulder with a sword. Or, more likely, this person will be in a car or a store or under a vinyl canopy when it happens. Or online or on the phone. It could be an e-mail re: your knighthood. Or a long, laughing, rambling phone message in which every person this person has ever known is talking on a speakerphone and they are all saying, You have passed the test, it was all just a test, we were only kidding, real life is so much better than that.

How will the performer-audience interaction change, now that we are so used to participating in the lives of strangers?

Stop saying hurt._ She turned on him; the wounded animal finally breaking free. __ou fall over on the pavement, that hurts; you stub your toe, that hurts; you trap your finger in a car door, shit, that hurts. You did not hurt me. James. It was like you took a razor and pressed down hard in the tenderest place.

Seeing him again had been a gut punch.

Fate bring two people together and it is love's job to keep them there

No one is sent by accident to anyone.

The animals known as human beings live in humongous condominium blocks, just going about their daily lives. I've come to realize that it's just a modern jungle. And I'm the girl who's wandered into the forest.

Something refused to come into focus in my thinking. Indistinctly, as though in a fog, shapes moved toward me and retreated just beyond cognition. But that getting a hold of things is the uncertainty. As the Tractatus says right at the beginning, __he world is everything that is the case._ It seemed as though the Mammy__ivas® were just like Steve Jobs, trying to have reality bent to their own wills. Objectively, the iPhone was a muddle of mysticism and logic__reakable glass, non-ergonomic design, lousy battery life, lousy irreplaceable battery, lousy headphone jack, lousy virtual keyboard, lousy email, lousy memory, lousy lice, etc., etc, and an interface that you had to adapt to by pretending as an article of faith that no adaptation was required. The Mammy__ivas® promised a seamless racial interface__ternal blackness ordered and majestic. They put a benign face on their lust for panoptic power. They promised to discipline and punish with pancakes.