“…that it would be like knowing her fully, completely…”

“I don’t want to hurt you with ugliness, but maybe…”

“The strangest thing about someone dying is that it isn’t strange at all.”

“the ghosts in our empty driver’s seats—and the humiliation”

“It is the exact date that gauzy childhood ended and life sped up…”

“Stop competing with other women, and start holding them up”

“but the dead have always served as cautions to the living”

“In middle school, I tried to have an eating disorder.”

“People who like labels have one for me: “adoptive mom,””

“…its underlying biology that informs my experience of my brain.”

“I remember all those nights she snuck into my room to prune back my eyelashes”

“smoking weed by a old knotted tree because you said it would be fine”

“I don’t want her buried, I want her burnt. But I don’t want her ashes.”

“Something like a drug in the hunt for the truth within the psyche.”

“I wish I could learn how to live with this fear”

“The apocalypse came and went and left me untouched”

“any child from a meth environment had been sexually abused”

“leave it up to fate, my body will do what it will”

“Literacy is one of the most powerful motors of political awareness”