She took a breath as if the question was something she had to swim under.
“You’re out of bed.”
“Yes,” I said. To be human is to state the obvious. Repeatedly, over and over, until the end of time.
If you wanted to get someone on your side, what you really had to do was relieve their pain.
She seemed to be continually operating above the task she was doing. A melody, rising above the rhythm.
Because the possibility of pain is where love stems from.
I have to admit that humans waste a lot of their time—almost all of it—with hypothetical stuff. I could be rich. I could be famous. I could have been hit by that bus. I could have been born with fewer moles or bigger breasts. I could have spent more of my youth learning foreign languages. They must exercise the conditional tense more than any other known life-form.
The two girls were chewing something they didn’t plan to swallow and were giggling excitedly.
A homo sapiens was a primitive hunter who had woken each day with the knowledge he could kill. And now, the equivalent knowledge was only that he would wake up each day and buy something.
If getting drunk was how people forgot they were mortal, then hangovers were how they remembered.
The kind that could only be possible in someone who was going to die at some point in the future, and also someone who had lived enough to know that loving and being loved back was a hard thing to get right, but when you managed it, you could see forever.
I could have lied. I could have backtracked. But I realized lying, though essential to keep someone in love with you, actually wasn’t what love demanded. It demanded truth.
The single biggest act of bravery or madness anyone can do is the act of change.
When you watch the news and see members of your species in turmoil, do not think there is nothing you can do. But know i is not done by watching news.