You can't just make me different and then leave,' I said out loud to her. 'Because I was fine before, Alaska. I was fine with just me and last words and school friends, and you can't just make me different and then die.' Fir she had embodied the Great Perhaps-she had proved to me that it was worth it to leave behind my minor life for grander maybes, and now she was gone and with her my faith in perhaps.

Losing you're co-remember meant losing the memory itself.

People, I thought, wanted security. They couldn't bear the though of their loved ones not existing, and couldn't even imagine themselves not existing. I finally decided that people believe in an afterlife because they couldn't bear not to.

I wondered if hurdlers ever thought, you know, "This would go faster if we just got rid of the hurdles.

I thought of how infinity is not a large number. It is something else entirely. It is boundlessness. You cannot travel faster than the speed of light. You must and will die. You cannot escape these boundaries. But the miracle and hope of human consciousness is that we can still conceive of boundlessness.

I needed, I decided, to really know her, because I needed more to remember. Before I could begin the shameful process of forgetting the how and the why of her living and dying, I needed to learn it: How. Why. When. Where. What.

and I told myself -- as I've told myself before -- that the body shuts down then the pain gets too bad, that consciousness is temporary, that this will pass. But just like always, I didn't slip away. I was left on the shore with the waves washing over me, unable to drown.

He'd fought hard, Lida told me, as if there was another way to fight.

There's no way of knowing that your last good day is Your Last Good Day. At the time, it is just another good day.