Most people don't even try to get what they want because of the painful reckoning with their parents it entails. - Alison Bechdel

On our second date, she kissed me in a bar. I invited her home. We just caught the F train, which seemed like a good omen.

The idea that our unconscious possesses such sure aim excited me. I became more attuned to my own erroneously carried out actions.

It’s true that he didn’t kill himself until I was nearly twenty. But his absence resonated retroactively, echoing back through all the time I knew him. Maybe it was the converse of the way amputees feel pain in a missing limb. He really was there all those years, a flesh-and-blood presence smelling of sawdust and sweat and designer cologne. But I ached as if he were already gone.