Bokelskere.no

..the way her mouth curled up on the right side all the time, like she was preparing to smirk, like she´s mastered the right half of the Mona Lisa´s inimitable smile...

she had the kind of eyes that predisposed you to supporting her endeavor

Luck is for suckers!

God will punish the wicked. And before He does, we will.

Some day no one will remember that she ever existed, I wrote in my notebook, and then, or that I did. Because memories fall apart too. And then you're left with nothing, left not even with a ghost, but with a shadow. In the beginning, she had haunted me, haunted my dreams, but even now, just weeks later, she was slipping away, falling apart in my memory and everyone else's, dying again.

The times that were the most fun seemed always to be followed by sadness now, because it was when life started to feel like it did when she was with us that we realised how utterly, totally gone she was.

More than anything, I felt the unfairness of it, the inarguable injustice of loving someone who might have loved you back but can't due to deadness, and then I leaned forward, my forehead against the back of Takumi's headrest, and I cried, whimpering, and I didn't even feel sadness so much as pain. It hurt, and that is not a euphemism. It hurt like a beating.

There comes a time when we realise that our parents cannot save themselves or save us, that everyone who wades through time eventually gets dragged out to sea by the undertow - that, in short, we are all going.

In the long quiet that followed, as we passed around the wine and slowly became drunker, I found myself thinking about President William McKinley, the third American president to be assassinated. He lived for several days after he was shot, and towards the end, his wife started crying and screaming, "I want to go too! I want to go too!" And with his last measure of strength, McKinley turned to her and spoke his last words: "We are all going."

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.