I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not fuck, like in those movies. Not even have sex. Just sleep together, in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was a hurricane.

Those awful things are survivable, because we are as indestructible as we believe ourselves to be. When adults say, "Teenagers think they are invincible" with that sly, stupid smile on their faces, they don't know how right they are. We need never be hopeless, because we can never be irreparably broken. We think that we are invincible because we are. We cannot be born, and we cannot die. Like all energy, we can only change shapes and sizes and manifestations. They forget that when they get old. They get scared of losing and failing. But that part of us greater than the sum of parts cannot begin and cannot end, and so it cannot fail.

Thomas Edison´s last words were, "It´s very beautiful over there." I don´t know where there is, but I know it´s somewhere, and I hope it´s beautiful.

People, I thought, wanted security. They couldn´t bear the idea of death being a big black nothing, couldn´t bear the thought of their loved ones not existing and couldn´t even imagine themselves not existing. I finally decided that people believed in an afterlife because they couldn´t bear not to.

She tought me everything I knew about crawfish and kissing and pink wine and poetry. She made me different.