Dress Codes for Small Towns

I do not know what type of love we are—history, future, or infinity—but we are love all the same. Welded strangely together like something in my garage. Like Guinevere or the unicorns. And we are just as unfinished.

I think there’s a place where love equals history and a place where love equals the future and a place where love is just love and it doesn’t go away no matter whether you get it back or not. Figuring out the difference—”

“Is impossible,”

I figure if God made my tear ducts, He has to deal with me using them

Death can muddle beliefs and raise questions, but it makes love crystal clear.

Boys really are such affectionate assholes.

This isn’t freedom; this is release. I let myself feel everything, the way I haven’t with everyone else because I’ve been too busy thinking to feel.

Mom and I, well, we exist in much more incorporeal space. I don’t measure her love in hours spent with me. I measure it in hours spent understanding me.

Basically we’re all looking for someone who knows who we are and will break it to us gently.

—ROBERT BRAULT

Exasperated, Batman removed the mask and laid it carefully next to the little girl on the bleachers.

David’s jaw dropped. “You’re a girl,” he said to Batman.

“Yeah, so?” she said. She strutted back to home plate and sent a pitch sailing into the grass—the farthest hit of the day.

He slapped her a high five as she crossed home plate. “I didn’t know Batman could be a girl.”

She huffed. “Well, Buckaroo, a girl can be anything.”

I hear that he has dumped a landfill worth of guilt on me. I hear myself shrinking to the size of my boots when I was just eighty feet tall a moment ago.