A little less random, sometimes poignant…
- The girl on the bus – “Every so often, I wonder what happened to her, when I catch a glimpse of that grace in somebody else. I wonder if the perfection faded as she grew up, did her beauty bring her happiness, or pain? It never brought her fame, certainly — I would have recognised that face if I ever saw it again.”
- The girl on the train – “And every day from Monday to Friday (and every other Saturday) he would see her. She was his age, maybe a bit older, and she was (to his eyes) perfection. “
- The note I didn’t give to the woman in the bookstore – “noticed you while I was standing in line for coffee. I noticed you several times actually, but I don’t like to stare. You seemed so pensive, so serious I did not come over and talk to you, but I wanted you to know that you are a fascinating person to look at, to watch.”
- Where I go when I masturbate – “Her back was always beautiful. Fair skin dusted with freckles and a dancers waist – odd considering her diet and lack of exercise. She very much enjoyed having it massaged and touched. I would say she enjoyed having it scratched, but I was and am a nail biter and thus I lack the necessary tools for scratching. The touching would have to do…”
- I knew enough about him to know his name and what kind of snowball he could make – “After a while, Ben stopped coming around the house, but Mom still had Uncle Brian over to watch us for the major part of the weekend. Occasionally, Uncle Brian would bring his friend Eddy over. After we were supposed to be asleep, we would get up to see if we could catch Uncle Brian in Mom’s clothes again, but instead we would find Uncle Brian holding Eddy’s hand, watching t.v. while sitting on the couch.”
- She makes sniffing sounds, and I don’t know if she’s snorting coke or weeping – “I sat down at the kitchen table and opened the paper. I knew it was useless to try and talk to right then. She was irrational, probably high, and just an emotional mess.”
- Cut off that stupid goatee and move on – “Ever since I had lost Meredith due to her drug problem, all my friends were trying to set me up with different girls they knew. I hated the experience. No matter who I met, or how beautiful they were, they weren’t the same. Just because Meredith snorted stuff and ran around cranked out all the time didn’t make her a bad person, and how dare they call her a bitch? I just didn’t understand my friends motives back then.”
- I come home, she lifted up her wings. I guess that this must be the place. – “I called a real estate agent in Colorado the next day. I asked about expenses and climate and what he could show me in the line of a log cabin in the mountains. None of that stuff really mattered, no matter how much it cost or how cold it was going to end up being, we were going. This is what she wanted and I was going to give it to her.”
- A Horse With No Name backwards – “I laughed. She laughed. We flopped back on the bed and spent the afternoon listening to A Horse With No Name play backwards. It was beautiful. It is still my favorite song.”
- Ginny and Lola don’t work on Thursdays. Sorry, Sugar. – “I wonder now if this will be the case for Noah when he comes back home to his town for my funeral. It’s still a long time from now, or at least I hope so, but I hate the idea that he could come back to find that every Lola that he found so familiar through his high school years will have been replaced by gum-chewing girls from Jersey named Jackie or Jac or Lyn.”
- I feel your kisses for days – “We’d met, as people do, through a mutual friend. She was a shy, captivating, beautiful, intelligent young woman (not to speak of her only in the past tense… she still is captivating and intelligent, though less shy and more beautiful because of it), and I was immediately smitten.”
- You meant for this node to be read by me, and I would like to respond – “A friend of a friend told me that there was something you wanted to tell me, but for some reason, couldn’t say it to my face. They told me about this Web site where you could write anything you wanted and that you’d written a sort of a letter to me. They told me how to find it. I went and looked.”
- God slipped away quietly, during third period physics class – “The next day at school, I got the call. God slipped away quietly,during third period physics class. He raised his arm up as if to wave good-bye and then he flat-lined. God died peacefully at age 52 in a hospital bed. My only regret from my time spent with him is that I never believed in him until he had already passed through my hands.“
- Fingerfucking your best friend – “I never told our friends, but they knew. They knew what kind of girl I was. We went anywhere and the kids our grade picked on us. Lesbians. Lesbians. Dyke. Dyke. Dyke. Dyke. Butch. Hey Butch. We were going to stay this way forever, in spite of the world. Silly Cinderellas giving Prince Charming the finger. But instead you fucked a boy or two and you stopped being my best friend.”
- First kiss – “After a while (a little bit of a while, actually), he looked really disturbed for a minute and said “That wasn’t your first kiss, was it?” in a tone that a person would also say “You don’t have leprosy, do you?”
- At night, her eyes closed, she would – “Tonight, however, she had this miserable little desire to go home. Heartbreak forced her to feel this way, and it was so infuriating she felt the need to crush a gift from someone in tonight’s audience. The pain, the isolation she suffered only compounded with the knowledge that no respite lay in her family home.”
- The picture she drew in my notebook – “And on the subway I ran my fingers over the sun, the bright light, the rays that had been so carefully adjusted. I am not going to be her, that’s for sure. But I am going to make it on my own, I know that now. Someday I will thank her for this.”
- To a beautiful woman without any ketchup – “He hands you a bottle of bright red and holds it a moment longer, pauses, invites you to sit. And you do and you laugh and you mean it. I’ve lost my appetite.”
- Daddy, stop hitting me and tell me you love me – “I stand there, weeping. I can feel the outline of his hand, my burning face. A tear runs down my cheek, and I stifle a sniff. I tell myself It’s not your fault, you didn’t do anything wrong, this isn’t happening, this isn’t happening, this isn’t but it is…”