Hanya Yanagihara

Their friend Lionel used to say that Willem must have been a fisherman in a past life, because he couldn’t help but attract pussy.

friend Lionel used to say that Willem must have been a fisherman in a past life, because he couldn’t help but attract pussy.

He was fatherless, and he knew that fatherless children mourned the absence in their lives.

Of course, they both craved beauty, but that would have to wait. Or rather, they would have to wait for it.

But somewhere inside you, whether you were making out with someone in a bar or having dinner with your friends, was always your canvas, its shapes and possibilities floating embryonically behind your pupils.

Tonight, I am a camera, he told himself, and tomorrow I will be JB again.

He talked and talked, and Andy listened, his face expressionless. There was no one else in the café but the two of them, and outside, the snow fell faster and thicker, and he felt, despite his anxiety, deeply calm, and glad he was telling somebody, and that that somebody was a person who knew him and Jude both, and had for many years.

Once again, they rejoined the slipstream of life; once again, they learned to obey the calendar

He hopes that Nicholas never experienced what he had, but he’s also certain he hasn’t, and the knowledge of that makes him cry harder. That had been one of Harold’s arguments when he was trying to get him to report the attack; that Caleb was dangerous, and that by reporting him, by having him arrested, he would be protecting other people from him. But he had known that wasn’t true: Caleb wouldn’t do to other people what he did to him. He hadn’t hit and hated him because he hit and hated other people; he had hit and hated him because of who he was, not because of who Caleb was

climate. Or maybe he is closer still: maybe he is that gray cat that has begun to sit outside our neighbor’s house, purring when I reach out my hand to it; maybe he is that new puppy I see tugging at the end of my other neighbor’s leash; maybe he is that toddler I saw running through the square a few months ago, shrieking with joy, his parents huffing after him; maybe he is that flower that suddenly bloomed on the rhododendron bush I thought had died long ago; maybe he is that cloud, that wave, that rain, that mist. It isn’t only that he died, or how he died; it is what he died believing. And so I try to be kind to everything I see, and in everything I see, I see him.