What were you before you met me?""I think I was drowning""And what are you now?""Water

What we would give to have the ruined lives of animals tell a human story—when our lives are in themselves the story of animals.

Every history has more than one thread, each thread a story of division. The journey takes four thousand eight hundred and thirty miles, more than the length of this country. The monarchs that fly south will not make it back north. Each departure, then, is final.

To look at something is to fill your whole life with it, if only briefly.

Some one said history moves in a spiral, not the line we have come to expect. We travel through time in a circular trajectory, our distance increasing from an epicenter only to return again, one circle removed.

[T]heories are for people with too much time and not enough determination.

Cocaine, laced with oxycodone, makes everything fast and still at once, like when you’re on the train and, gazing across the fogged New England fields, at the brick Colt factory where cousin Victor works, you see its blackened smokestack— parallel to the train, like it’s following you, like where you’re from won’t let you off the hook. Too much joy, I swear, is lost in our desperation to keep it.

Maybe in the next life we’ll meet each other for the first time—believing in everything but the harm we’re capable of.