Still, I prefer the present—your present face. The past holds nothing for me.

If anything, you could probably be a little harder on yourself.

You droned on, demolishing in the space of a few hours any previous possibility you might have been deemed interesting.

Beneath the zeitgeisty affectations he was an old school creepy letcher photographer guy.

Like many films of the period, it featured a sociopathic hero, a saintly villain and the default bloody Jackson Pollock ending.

The way I like to look at a photograph is to imagine that the person who took it knew that this was the last thing they would ever see.

On the fifth anniversary of her mother’s death she found a lump on her breast. There was no one to tell; the roommate-slash-fuckup she occasionally slept with had skipped out in the middle of the night without paying rent. She wasn’t close with anyone at work, and anyway, she’d been laid off three weeks earlier. Yesterday she’d thought, “if one more thing happens, I don’t know what I’ll do.” And she’d been right: she didn’t know what to do.

What would you do if you could go back in time?
Probably die of embarrassment.

As he struggled up to greet me, even with his belt cinched so tightly it nearly cut him in half, his pants fell down. They had nothing to hold onto. To this day I remember the look on his face. Apologetic; afraid he’d embarrassed me.

She said, Hell, for me, would be eternity, with you.

The best advice I ever got, although for a time I didn’t take it that way. It wasn’t offered in kindness—just a curt STFU.

Parked in front of a liquor store, a  song comes on and you find yourself sobbing. One of your grandfathers was maudlin, the other erratic and violent. You’ve always oscillated between the two, but lately there’s been little in-between.

The workings of mathematics, never fathomable, in the middle of the night became a source of terror.