I thought about how I had now let a self-proclaimed lunatic into my house twice and considered the possibility that my life needed sorting out.

I know what death smells like. Death smells like gasoline, singed hair and fingernails.It smells like cooking meat. My meat.

How nice that must be, to blend in with unexceptional people in that banal, work-a-day banter. Like regular people.

Junie says that the worst thing about shame is the way it chains you down. The way it holds your mind hostage and won’t let you go, gnawing from the inside out, feeding on you like a parasite.

We just didn’t want to go home, where we would be surrounded by what we truly are and all that we pretended to be, facing what we might never reach.

It’s the way people look at you when they know you’re damaged, but don’t know how to react to knowing a thing like that.

The counselor says that with more time and more surgeries, I will begin to feel normal again. She says this with a mouth that can still smile. It’s so easy to be reassuring when you have lips.

That’s the problem with things dying. They’re stuck being dead forever while everything else evolves and makes new stories.

Whatever it is that you know, or that you don’t know, tell me about it. We can exchange tirades. The comma is my favorite piece of punctuation and I’ve got all night.

Not every daughter mourns the loss of a mother.