Odd to think of myself that way, small and blind and tethered to her. In that time before memory, everything I touched was hers. I heard her voice from the inside, with no idea that she was a separate person. Back then, she had simply been the world.

In fight or flight Kai has always chose for us, and my mother is made out of wings. I don’t think I am like her, not in this way.

That’s not how families are structured. In families, he realized, children are added to, not superseded. The addition of a child is not a betrayal of previous or current children.

I could feel the ghosts of all the girls I’d been behind me in the alleyway, creeping in my wake. I could almost hear my own footsteps as an echo. For a moment it was so real that I spooked myself. I stopped and turned to look. There was only silence and darkness. I walked on.

You can’t go around holding the worst thing you ever did in your hand, staring at it. You gotta cook supper, put gas in the car. You gotta plant more zinnias.

It was love, though. Love, or some other, nameless feeling that was sister to it. I was racked with it. It thundered through me, shook my frame... This, I thought. This is how supervillains start.

Young men see pretty, and they start hanging all the things they hope you’ll be onto you till you’re so weighed down you can’t move.

I wanted to fall in love, marry a dork like me, make more dorks.

She’s stepped right in and owned me, and yet, it does not feel like surrender. There is choice inside surrender. This is something much more basic.

I’d have to run away to New York and be a hooker and eat a pound of heroin and die.