“It felt like stumbling across Jesus Christ’s dream journal.”

“I should be cast out to sea”

“Caught somewhere between mortified and ravenous, she nodded”

“She wrote, ‘Vern you used to hurt me in your truck.’”

“It’s about just telling someone that you’re in pain and you don’t have a good reason”

“I was a covers-pulled-up-to-my-chin, lights-off, minimize-jiggling-however-possible lover”

“The violence in my scream startled us both”

“ten years of things not crashing into other things without warning”

“In those 2:00 a.m. can’t-sleep nights, I obsessively revise his death.”

“the way the body of a mother who has lost a child trembles”

“And then I just was still. Eyes open. Done breathing.”

“I keep adding to this fantasy: then I will eat my dead”

“…rooted in this obsession is a strange desire to constantly slow down…”

“I think he’s a she and think she’s so pretty”

“The part I would regret. The part that’s almost here”

“what to say to someone who has tried to commit suicide”

“Father wrote back that he has no son”

“Collecting is better than hoarding, I tell myself. Harmless.”

“seen by others becomes how we see ourselves, the little dot above the letter ‘i.’”