Sometimes, when we are sad, we have to do the opposite of sad. Sometimes we have to sing.

My mom was there to answer the unanswerable, to make sense of the fault in our life – and we got through that somehow; we came out on the other side. Now I’m 0 for...

This is what I’m supposed to be doing this summer. This is how I’m supposed to be passing my days. Figuring out the secret to how she was the most joyful person when she was...

Why she was the happy one when she was dying, and I just can’t seem to manage anything when I’m living.

Because this is what I believe – that second chances are stronger than secrets. You can let secrets go. But a second chance? You don’t let that pass you by.

Why am I doing this? Because it feels so good to talk like we used to, even though I know this is just a shadow of what we had. But I chase it anyway.

Because I’m living, and I sure as hell don’t have a clue how to feel anything but empty.

But I don’t feel like dealing because dealing requires too much energy, and energy is what I lack.

But I am tired of everyone being gone, and I am tired of everything that has tired me out for the last five years of my life.

And we’re all good, everything is forgiven between Beethoven and me because this is the part of me that hasn’t changed. In this monent I’m not defined by the other things, the things that happened...

[Referring to rape] It already is bigger than everything else. It lives in front of me, behind me, next to me, inside me every single day. My schedule is dictated by it, my habits by...

I am no longer the left behind. I am the living. And I want everything this life has to offer. I stop for a second and look around at all the shops and stores and...

…if you have someone who wants to heal, sometime they will respond to the unconventional. Their minds are more open to healing, so their bodies become more willing too. I believe that medication, while a...

I don’t tell her that my grasp on truth, on words, on people, has slipped. I was getting close, so close to normal again, and that’s been snatched away. I’m not even back where I...

We are what we love. We are the things, the people, the ideas we spend our days with. They center us, they drive us, they define us to our very core.Without them, we are empty.

She expected a lot of me. When I was in fourth grade working on a book report, she made me start the whole thing over when she read it and said it was barely even...

I don’t need to be any place else, because the music takes me to the only place I want to be right now. To the place where I am and have always been wholly me,...

Do you need anything?” she asks. A mom A dad. Someone. Anyone. Can you arrange for that? “Nah, I’m good.

Because maybe it’s in the stories that the people we love are still alive.

When someone you love has died, there is a certain grace period during which you can get away with murder. Not literal murder, but pretty much anything else.

Nothing is ever enough.

Get away from my house and all its rooms that echo, all the rooms I don’t enter anymore.

No, I am not all right, I want to say. Have you been to my house? Have you seen how empty it is?

Another deserted sentence. Another side effect of death. Words go AWOL.

Yeah, I’m just here for – ” I stop for a second, because I’m not sure how to finish the line out loud. To see if I can ever be happy, or even remotely human,...