Let me just unsubscribe to my own mind already, because I don’t get any of it.

Portrait: The Boy with All the Keys in the World with All the Locks

People die, I think, but your relationship with them doesn’t. It continues and is ever-changing.

They do make love stories for girls with black hearts after all. They go like this.

Reality is crushing. The world is a wrong-sized shoe. How can anyone stand it?

I do find the sibling connection endlessly fascinating, as I do all family dynamics. I like how siblings seem to create their own parentless mini-civilization within a family, one that has its own laws, myths,...

What if I’m in charge of my own damn light switch?

Maybe what my sister wanted was to stay here and get married and have a family.Maybe that was her color of extraordinary.

Life’s a freaking mess. In fact, I’m going to tell Sarah we need to start a new philosophical movement: messessentialism instead of existentialism: For those who revel in the essential mess that is life. Because...

My heart leaves, hitchhikes right out of my body, heads north, catches a ferry across the Bering Sea and plants itself in Siberia with the polar bears and ibex and long-horned goats until it turns...

It was right and wrong both. Love does as it undoes. It goes after, with equal tenacity, joy and heartbreak.

For me, there’s nothing better than getting immersed in a sprawling, epic, multi-generational family saga, and ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ by Gabriel Garcia Marquez is the most sprawling, epic, and multi-generational of them all.

The.World.Is.Not.A.Safe.Place.

And it’s just dawned on me that I might be the author of my own story, but so is everyone else the author of their own stories, and sometimes, like now, there’s no overlap.

This is our story to tell. You’d think for all the reading I do, I would have thought about this before, but I haven’t. I’ve never once thought about the interpretative, the story telling aspect...

I can’t shove the dark out of my way.

Sadness pulses out of us as we walk. I almost expect the trees to lower their branches when we pass, the stars to hand down some light. I breathe in the horsy scent of eucalyptus,...

I am insanely superstitious. All the woman in my family are, beginning with my grandmother, who would leave red ribbons under the beds and taught us how to find four-leaf clovers.

I’d been making desicions for days.I picked out the dress Bailey would wear forever-a black slinky one- innapropriate- that she loved.I chose a sweater to go over it, earrings, bracelet, necklace, her most beloved strappy...

Qué más da cómo lo llamen los demás —dice—. Esta es nuestrahistoria y la contamos como queremos.Es nuestra historia y la contamos como queremos. Se diría que contodo lo que leo esto se me debería...

That’s a misconception, Lennie. The sky is everywhere, it begins at your feet.

Male leads in love stories need to be devoted, need to chase trains, cross continents, give up fortunes and thrones, defy convention, face prosecution, take apart rooms and break the backs of angels, sketch the...

Someone might as well roll up the whole sky, pack it away for good.

I do have a tendency to want to go back to school at all times in my life. Maybe I’ll do the Ph.D. in art history when I’m 50, or maybe divinity school. I like...

Maybe a person is just made up of a lot of people,” I say. “Maybe we’re accumulating these new selves all the time.

,Cómo es posible que algo puedaparecer una idea tan brillante un día y una estupidez al siguiente?

There once was a girl who found herself dead.She peered over the ledge of heavenand saw that back on earthher sister missed her too much,was way too sad,so she crossed some pathsthat would not have...

You can tell your story any way you damn well please.Its your solo.

There are people everywhere standing in line at the movies, buying curtains, walking dogs, while inside, their hearts are ripping to shreds.

I grew up with older brothers, adore them, can’t imagine going through life without them, and I definitely think I draw on that love when I’m writing about siblings. It’s so powerful, the jump-in-front-of-a-train-to-protect-them kind...

Me would like an invisibility cloak to get the hell out of this mess.

I know the expression love bloomed is metaphorical, but in my heart in this moment, there is one badass flower, captured in time-lapse photography, going from bud to wild radiant blossom in ten seconds flat.

Everyone has always said I look like Bailey, but I don’t.I have grey eyes to her green,an oval face to her heart-shaped one,I’m shorter, scrawnier, paler, flatter, plainer, tamer.All we shared is a madhouse of...

There were once two sisterswho were not afriad of the darkbecause the dark was full of the other’s voiceacross the room,because even when the night was thickand starlessthey walked home together from the riverseeing who...

I don’t believe time heals. I don’t want it to. If I heal, doesn’t that mean I’ve accepted the world without her?

I have had this longstanding interest in going back to school to get a Ph.D. in art history. I was especially interested in exploring this idea of the ecstatic impulse in an artist.

I have a very low eerie threshold.

I run my hands through his hair, finally, finally, finally, then bring his head to mine and kiss him so hard our teeth collide, planets collide, kissing him now for each and every time we...

grief is a housewhere the chairshave forgotten how to hold usthe mirrors how to reflect usthe walls how to contain usgrief is a house that disappearseach time someone knocks at the dooror rings the bella...

This is how he came out: he floated into the air high above the sleeping forest, his green hat spinning a few feet above his head. In his hand was the open suitcase and out...

When I wear her clothes, I just feel safer, like she’s whispering in my ear.

I love art, and it plays a huge role in my life. It’s definitely one of my greatest joys, and I’m a bit fanatical about certain painters and poets and musicians and sculptors.

I’m thinking the reason I’ve been so quiet all those years is only because Brian wasn’t around yet for me to tell everything to.

And even as I’m kissing him and kissing him and kissing him, I wish I were kissing him, wanting more, more, more, more, like I can’t get enough, never will be able to get enough.

,Cómo voy asobrevivir a esta añoranza? ,Cómo lo hacen otros? La gente muereconstantemente. Todos los días. A todas horas. Hay familias por todo elmundo mirando camas donde ya no duerme nadie, zapatos que ya nadie...

Isn’t that what I always think when I get The Poor Motherless Girl Look? Like I’ve been shoved out of the airplane without a parachute because mothers are the parachutes.

I’m in self-imposed exile, cradled between split branches, in my favorite tree in the woods behind school. I’ve been coming here every day at lunch, hiding out until the bell rings, whittling words into the...

I was actually born in New York, and spent some of my childhood in Boston. But my family moved to San Diego when I was 12, and I went to high school here.

My sister will die over and over again for the rest of my life. Grief is forever. It doesn’t go away; it becomes a part of you, step for step, breath for breath. I will...

In photographs of us together, she is always looking at the camera, and I am always looking at her.