Marina Keegan The Opposite Of Loneliness Quotes

What we have to remember is that we can still do anything. We can change our minds. We can start over.

We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I could say that’s what I want in life.

We're so young. We can't, we MUST not loose this sense of possibility because in the end, it's all we have.

I want enough time to be in love with everything . . .

I miss dreaming forwards," Anna said. "What?" "I dream backwards now. You won't believe how backwards you'll dream someday.

And I cry because everything is so beautiful and so short.

I worry sometimes that humans are afraid of helping humans. There's less risk associated with animals, less fear of failure, fear of getting to involved.

So what I'm trying to say is you should text me back. Because there's a precedent. Because there's an urgency. Because there's a bedtime. Because when the world ends I might not have my phone charged and If you don't respond soon, I won't know if you'd wanna leave your shadow next to mine.

something about the stillness or my state of mind reminded me of the world’s remarkable capacity to carry on in every place at once.

We have these impossibly high standards and we'll probably never live up to our perfect fantasies of our future selves.

I saw everything in the world build up and then everything in the world fall down again.

I will live for love, and the rest will take care of itself.

I'm scared of losing this web we're in. This elusive, indefinable, opposite of loneliness.

We're so young. We're so young. We're twenty-two years old. We have so much time. There's this sentiment I sometimes sense, creeping in our collective conscious as we lie alone after a party, or pack up our books when we give in and go out - that it is somehow too late. That others are somehow ahead. More accomplished, more specialized. More on the path to somehow saving the world, somehow creating or inventing or improving. That it's too late now to BEGIN a beginning and we must settle for continuance, for commencement.

But it became clear very quickly that I'd underestimated how much I liked him. Not him, perhaps, but the fact that I had someone on the other end of an invisible line. Someone to update and get updates from, to inform of a comic discovery, to imagine while dancing in a lonely basement, and to return to, finally, when the music stopped.

It's not quite love and it's not quite community; it's just this feeling that there are people, an abundance of people, who are in this together. Who are on your team. When the check is paid and you stay at the table. When it's four A.M. and no one goes to bed. That night with the guitar. That night we can't remember. That time we did, we went , we saw, we laughed, we felt. The hats.

What we have to remember is that we can still do anything. We can change our minds. We can start over. Get a post-bac or try writing for the first time. The notion that it’s too late to do anything is comical. It’s hilarious. We’re graduating from college. We’re so young. We can’t, we MUST not lose this sense of possibility because in the end, it’s all we have.

we just battle time.

Maybe I’m ignorant and idealistic but I just feel like that can’t possibly be true. I feel like we know that. I feel like we can do something really cool to this world. And I fear—at twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five—we might forget.

But as I watched him smile back at me and zip his coat, I saw everything in the world build up and then everything in the world fall down again.

Do you wanna leave soon? No, I want enough time to be in love with everything...

I read somewhere that radio waves just keep traveling outward, flying into the universe with eternal vibrations. Sometime before I die I think I'll find a microphone and climb to the top of a radio tower. I'll take a deep breath and close my eye because it will start to rain right when I reach the top. Hello, I'll say to outer space, this is my card.

The middle of the universe is tonight, is here, And everything behind is a sunk cost.

The best years of our lives are not behind us. They're part of us and they are set for repetition as we grow up and move to New York and away from New York and wish we did or didn't live in New York.

I worry sometimes that humans are afraid of helping humans. There’s less risk associated with animals, less fear of failure, fear of getting too involved. In war movies, a thousand soldiers can die gruesomely, but when the horse is shot, the audience is heartbroken. It’s the My Dog Skip effect. The Homeward Bound syndrome.

We’re our own hardest critics and it’s easy to let ourselves down. Sleeping too late. Procrastinating. Cutting corners. More than once I’ve looked back on my high school self and thought: how did I do that? How did I work so hard? Our private insecurities follow us and will always follow us.

The notion that it’s too late to do anything is comical. It’s hilarious.

Sometimes I think about what it would be like if there was actual peace. The whole planet would be super sustainable: windmills everywhere, solar paneled do-bops, clean streets. Before the world freezes and goes dark, it would be perfect. The generation flying its tiny cars would think itself special. Until one day, vaguely, quietly, the sun would flicker out and they'd realized that none of us are. Or that all of us are.

I blame the Internet. Its inconsiderate inclusion of everything.Success is transparent and accessible, hanging down where it can tease but not touch us. We talk into these scratchy microphones and take extra photographs but I still feel like there are just SO MANY PEOPLE. Every day, 1,035.6 books are published; sixty-six million people update their status each morning. At night, aimlessly scrolling, I remind myself of elementary school murals. One person can make a difference! But the people asking me what I want to be when I grow up don't want me to make a poster anymore. They want me to fill out forms and hand them rectangular cards that say HELLO THIS IS WHAT I DO.

They try to fight the waves, but they can’t fight the moon. They can’t fight the world’s rotation or the bathymetry of oceans or the inevitability that sometimes things just don’t work out.

Do you wanna leave soon? No, I want enough time to be in love with everything ... And I cry because everything is so beautiful and so short.

When a young person dies, much of the tragedy lies in her promise: what she would have done.

Everything will be destroyed no matter how hard we work to create it. The idea terrifies me. I want tiny permanents. I want gigantic permanents! I want what I think and who I am captured in an anthology of indulgence I can comfortingly tuck into a shelf in some labyrinthine library.

Secretly, of course, the pauses in our correspondence were as calculated as our casualness.

I'm so jealous. Laughable jealousies, jealousies of everyone who might get a chance to speak from the dead. I've zoomed out my timeline to include the apocalypse, and, religionless, I worship the potential for my own tangible trace. How presumptuous! To assume specialness in the first place. As I age, I can see the possibilities fade from the fourth-grade displays: it's too late to be a doctor, to star in a movie, to run for president. There's a really good chance I'll never do anything. It's selfish and self-centered to consider, but it scares me.

Everyone else is so successful, and I hate them.

Fifty stranded whales are a tangible crisis with a visible solution. There’s camaraderie in the process, a Free Willy fantasy, an image of Flipper in everyone’s mind. There’s nothing romantic about waking up a man on a park bench and making him walk to a shelter.

When the moon gets bored, it kills whales. Blue whales and fin whales and humpback, sperm, and orca whales: centrifugal forces don’t discriminate.

But the thing is, we’re all like that. Nobody wakes up when they want to. Nobody did all of their reading (except maybe the crazy people who win the prizes . . .). We have these impossibly high standards and we’ll probably never live up to our perfect fantasies of our future selves. But I feel like that’s okay.

... the addiction of self-deprivation ...

She had the rare combination of being quiet and popular, a code that made her intimidating to younger, fashionable girls and mysterious to older, confident boys.

At the Unitarian Universalist Christmas pageant in Cambridge, Massachusetts, it didn't matter that Mary insisted on keeping her nails painted black or that Joseph had come out of the closet. On December 25 at seven and nine p.m., three wise women would follow the men down the aisle -- one wearing a kimono and another, African garb; instead of myrrh they would bring chicken soup, instead of frankincense they'd play lullabies. The shepherds had a line on protecting the environment and the innkeeper held a foreclosure sign. No one quite believed in God and no one quite didn't -- so they made it about the songs and the candles and the pressing together of bodies on lacquered wooden pews.

I worry sometimes that humans are afraid of helping humans. There's less risk associated with animals, less fear of failure, fear of getting too involved. In war movies, a thousand soldiers can die gruesomely, but when the horse is shot, the audience is heartbroken.

No one quite believed in God and no one quite didn't.

High on their posthumous pedestals, the dead become hard to see. Grief, deference, and the homogenizing effects of adulation blur the details, flatten the bumps, sand off the sharp corners.

I’m just tired. I’m tired all the time. I wake up and I’m tired, I go to sleep and I’m tired.

The game meandered on and stories began to take over. It was getting late but going to bed meant good-bye so we pushed forward

...I want enough time to be in love with everything. And I cry, because everything is so beautiful and so short.

I remember finding it extremely hard to open presents as a child because the requisite theatricality was too exhausting.

There’s this sentiment I sometimes sense, creeping in our collective conscious as we lie alone after a party, or pack up our books when we give in and go out—that it is somehow too late. That others are somehow ahead. More accomplished, more specialized. More on the path to somehow saving the world, somehow creating or inventing or improving. That it’s too late now to BEGIN a beginning and we must settle for continuance, for commencement.

I have seen too many young writers give up because they couldn’t handle the repeated failures their profession threw at them. They had talent, but they lacked determination and resilience. Marina had all three, and that’s why I am certain she would have succeeded.

There are so many places I still want to go, so many things I still want to do!

We don't have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I could say that's what I want in life.

We don't have a word for the opposite of loneliness, but if we did, I could say that's what I want in life. What I'm grateful and thankful to have found at Yale, and what I'm scared of losing when we wake up tomorrow after Commencement and leave this place. “It's not quite love and it's not quite community; it's just this feeling that there are people, an abundance of people, who are in this together. Who are on your team. When the check is paid and you stay at the table. When it's four A.M. and no one goes to bed. That night with the guitar. That night we can't remember. That time we did, we went , we saw, we laughed, we felt. The hats.

What bothers me is this idea of validation, of rationalization. The notion that some of us (regardless of what we tell ourselves) are doing this because we are not sure what else to do and it's easy to apply to and it will pay us decently and it will make us feel like we're still successful.

we’re not (for the most part) producing something, or helping someone, or engaging in something that we’re explicitly passionate about. Even if it’s just for two or three years. That’s a lot of years!

We’re so young. We’re so young. We’re twenty-two years old. We have so much time. There’s this sentiment I sometimes sense, creeping in our collective conscious as we lie alone after a party, or pack up our books when we give in and go out—that it is somehow too late. That others are somehow ahead. More accomplished, more specialized. More on the path to somehow saving the world, somehow creating or inventing or improving. That it’s too late now to BEGIN a beginning and we must settle for continuance, for commencement. When we came to Yale, there was this sense of

These tiny groups that make us feel loved and save and part of something even on our loneliest nights when we stumble home to our computers - partnerless, tired, awake. We won't have those next year. We won't live on the same block as all our friends. We won't have a bunch of group texts. This scares me. More than finding the right job or city or spouse, I'm scared of losing this web we're in. This elusive, indefinable, opposite of loneliness. This feeling I feel right now.

Whales feel cohesion, a sense of community, of loyalty. The distress call of a lone whale is enough to prompt its entire pod to rush to its side- a gesture that lands them nose to nose in the same sand. It's a fatal symphony of echolocation, a siren call to the sympathetic.

If you didn’t already know this, the sun is going to die. When I think about the future, I don’t think about inescapable ends. But even if we solve global warming and destroy nuclear bombs and control population, ultimately the human race will annihilate itself if we stay here. Eventually, inevitably, we will no longer be able to live on Earth: we have a giant fireball clock ticking down twilight by twilight. In many ways, I think mortality is more manageable when we consider our eternal components, our genetics and otherwise that carry on after us. Still, soon enough, the books we write and the plants we grow will freeze up and rot in the darkness. But maybe there’s hope. What the universe really boils down to is whether a planet evolves a life-form intelligent enough to create technology capable of transporting and sustaining that life-form off the planet before the sun in that planet’s solar system explodes. I have a limited set of comparative data points, but I’d estimate that we’re actually doing okay at this point. We already have (intelligent) life, technology, and (primitive) space travel. And we still have some time before our sun runs out of hydrogen and goes nuclear. Yet none of that matters unless we can develop a sustainable means of living and traveling in space. Maybe we can. What I’ve concluded is that if we do reach this point, we have crossed a remarkable threshold—and will emerge into the (rare?) evolutionary status of having outlived the very life source that created us. It’s natural selection on a Universal scale. “The Origin of the Aliens,” one could say; a survival of the fittest planets. Planets capable of evolving life intelligent enough to leave before the lights go out. I suppose that without a God, NASA is my anti-nihilism. Alone and on my laptop, these ideas can humble me into apathy.

We push and shove and wet whales all day, then walk home through town past homeless men curled up on benches - washed up like whales on the curbsides. Pulled outside by the moon and struggling for air among the sewers. They're suffocating too, but there's no town assembly line of food. No palpable urgency, no airlifting plane.

Aging is harder for beautiful people, and Anna was beautiful.

and something about the stillness or my state of mind reminded me of the world's remarkable capacity to carry on in every place at once.

I'm trying to figure out if I love art enough to be poor

My instinct, of course, is to imagine us as one of many planets racing its evolution against its sun--merely one in the galactic Darwinian pursuit. But maybe we're not. Maybe all this talk of the inevitability of aliens is garbage and we're miraculously, beautifully alone in our biological success. What if we're winning? What if we're actually the most evolved intelligence in all this big bang chaos? What if other planets have bacteria and single-celled genotypes but nothing more? The precedent is all the more pressing. Humans alone could be winning the race against our giant gas time bomb and running with the universal Olympic torch. What an honor. What a responsibility. What a gift we have been given to be born in an atmosphere with oxygen and carbon dioxide and millions of years and phenotypes cheering us on with recycles of energy. The thing is, I think we can make it. I think we can shove ourselves into spaceships before things get too cold. I only hope we don't fuck things up before that. Because millions of years is a long time and I don't want to let the universe down.

Oftentimes at Yale, I’ll be sitting around studying or drinking or hanging out when I’ll hear one of my friends talk about a project they’re doing for a class or a rally they’re organizing or a play they’re putting on. And I’ll just think, really, honestly, how remarkably privileged we are to hang around with such a talented group of people around here. I am constantly reminded of the immense passion and creativity of those with whom I get to spend time every day.

I used to think printing things made them permanent, but that seems so silly now. Everything will be destroyed no matter how hard we work to create it. The idea terrifies me. I want tiny permanents. I want gigantic permanents! I want what I think and who I am captured in an anthology of indulgence I can comfortingly tuck into a shelf in some labyrinthine library. Everyone thinks they’re special—my grandma for her Marlboro commercials, my parents for discos and the moon. You can be anything, they tell us. No one else is quite like you. But I searched my name on Facebook and got eight tiny pictures staring back. The Marina Keegans with their little hometowns and relationship statuses. When we die, our gravestones will match. HERE LIES MARINA KEEGAN, they will say. Numbers one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.

My car was not gross; it was occupied, cluttered, cramped. It became an extension of my bedroom, and thus an extension of myself. I had two bumper stickers on the back: REPUBLICANS FOR VOLDEMORT and the symbol for the Equal Rights Campaign. On the back side windows were OBAMA ’08 signs that my parents made me take down because they “dangerously blocked my sight lines.” The trunk housed my guitar but was also the library, filled with textbooks and novels, the giant tattered copy of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare and all one hundred chapters of Harry Potter on tape.

15. Specific mentions of Keats, Swan Lake, Andy Warhol, Salvador Dalí, Othello, Islamic architecture, Shakespeare, Monet’s lilies, Hemingway, Milton, and libraries appear throughout this collection. How do these scholarly and artistic references enhance the more informal tone of Keegan’s prose?

Success is transparent and accessible, hanging down where it can tease but not touch us. We talk into these scratchy microphones and take extra photographs but I still feel like there are just SO MANY PEOPLE. Every day, 1,035.6 books are published; sixty-six million people update their status each morning. At night, aimlessly scrolling, I remind myself of elementary school murals. One person can make a difference! But the people asking me what I want to be when I grow up don’t want me to make a poster anymore. They want me to fill out forms and hand them rectangular cards that say HELLO THIS IS WHAT I DO.

It was quiet, the old wood creaking and the snow barely visible outside the stained glass. And I sat down. And I looked up. At this giant room I was in. At this place where thousands of people had sat before me. And alone, at night, in the middle of a New Haven storm, I felt so remarkably, unbelievably safe.

I’m so jealous. Unthinkable jealousies, jealousies of the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel I’m reading and the Oscar- winning movie I just saw. Why didn’t I think to rewrite Mrs. Dalloway? I should have thought to chronicle a schizophrenic ballerina. It’s inexcusable. Everyone else is so successful, and I hate them.

Within a week, “The Opposite of Loneliness,” an essay that had appeared in the graduation issue of the Yale Daily News, had been read by more than a million people. “We’re so young. We’re so young,” Marina had written. “We’re twenty-two years old. We have so much time.” When a young person dies, much of the tragedy lies in her promise: what she would have done. But Marina left what she had already done: an entire body of writing, far more than could fit between these covers. As her parents and friends and I gathered her work, trying to find the most recent version of every story and essay, we knew that none of it was in exactly the form she would have wanted to publish. She was a demon reviser, rewriting and rewriting and rewriting even when everyone else thought something was done. (THERE CAN ALWAYS BE A BETTER THING.) We knew we couldn’t rewrite her work; only she could have done that.

Most firms are looking for people who will stay up until three A.M. seven nights a week making slides for a partner who goes home to Wellesley for dinner every night at five P.M.—and who will do so thinking that they’re ‘winning.’ Look at it this way: most firms assume that you’ll leave for law school or business school within three years, and they invest in your training accordingly. Quality mentoring when you’re young is worth whatever you pay for it. Sometimes that means less money, sometimes that means less of a life beyond work. But quality mentoring is not going to be delivered by someone who is twenty-six, and just one tidal cycle ahead of you.

Since the tragedy of Marina’s death, her parents have heard from strangers around the globe surprised to find themselves writing to share the impact of “meeting” Marina through her words: Jewish teenagers visiting a series of concentration camps while on “The March of the Living” and finding specific comfort and renewed purpose in her writings; college peers living more mindfully; musicians writing songs inspired by her; older readers making midlife recalibrations and career changes, whether they are returning to school or shifting to a nonprofit or finishing that manuscript; people simply rediscovering a sense of hope. These new life paths all build from Marina’s own sense that it’s never too late to change, that we must take action, that we are indeed “in this together.

I worry sometimes that humans are afraid of helping humans. There's less risk associated with animals, less fear of failure, fear of getting too involved. In war movies, a thousand soldiers can die gruesomely, but when the horse is shot, the audience is heartbroken. It's the my dog skip effect. The homeward bound syndrome. When we hear that the lady on the next street over has cancer, we don't see the entire town flock to her house. We push and shove wet whales all day, then walk home through town past homeless men curled up on benches- washed up like whales on the curbside. Pulled outside by the moon and struggling for air among the sewers. They're suffocating too, but there's no town assembly line of food. No palapa blue urgency, no airlifting plane.

Of course I don't want to be a consultant," she said the night before, clutching a borrowed copy of Marc Conentino's Case in point (the aspiring-consultant bible). It's just very scary to watch as many of your friends have already secured six-figure salaries and are going to be living in luxury next year. I'm trying to figure out if I love art enough to be poor.

We don’t have a word for the opposite of loneliness; but if we did, I could say that’s what I want if life.

So is there anything intrinsically wrong with the fact that 25 percent of employed Yale graduates end up in this industry? Yeah. I think so. Of course this is my own opinion, but to me there’s something sad about so many of us entering a line of work in which we’re not (for the most part) producing something, or helping someone, or engaging in something that we’re explicitly passionate about. Even if it’s just for two or three years. That’s a lot of years! And these aren’t just years. This is twenty-three and twenty-four and twenty-five. If it were a smaller percentage of people, perhaps it wouldn’t bother me so much. But it’s not.

Each word that she left behind is precious, including the simple three I rediscovered a few days after Marina’s memorial service. Her long-forgotten note, scrawled with a dry-erase marker on the back of a BB&N book slip and left on my desk when she was visiting from college, simply read, “Marina was here!” Marina was here. Yes, she was, in so many ways. And with an exclamation point. My hope is that through this book and Marina’s many legacies, we may all still hear her and be inspired by how she used her fleeting time to be passionately, vibrantly, fully here. —Beth McNamara August 2014

As far as other important people go, university president Richard Levin believes “there are many ways to contribute to the well-being of society, and there are many forms of public service.” He rejects the notion that “people who choose a business career aren’t interested in being public-spirited,” asserting that “what’s outstanding about Yale graduates is that whatever career they choose, they end up being active participants in the civic life of the communities in which they live.

What bothers me is this idea of validation, of rationalization. The notion that some of us (regardless of what we tell ourselves) are doing this because we’re not sure what else to do and it’s easy to apply to and it will pay us decently and it will make us feel like we’re still successful. I just haven’t met that many people who sound genuinely excited about these jobs. That’s super depressing! I don’t understand why no one is talking about it.

What bothers me is this idea of validation, of rationalization. The notion that some of us (regardless of what we tell ourselves) are doing this because we’re not sure what else to do and it’s easy to apply to and it will pay us decently and it will make us feel like we’re still successful.

I want to watch Shloe’s movies and I want to see Mark’s musicals and I want to volunteer with Joe’s nonprofit and eat at Annie’s restaurant and send my kids to schools Jeff has reformed and I’m just scared about this industry that’s taking all my friends and telling them this is the best way for them to be spending their time. Any of their time.

20. The day she graduated from college, Keegan told her mother that she was especially proud of her Yale Daily News article “Even Artichokes Have Doubts,” which went on to be adapted for the New York Times and discussed on NPR. When The Opposite of Loneliness was first published in April 2014, columnist Nicholas Kristof wrote, “Keegan was right to prod us all to reflect on what we seek from life, to ask these questions, to recognize the importance of passions as well as paychecks—even if there are no easy answers.” As Keegan reminds other young people that “we can do something really cool to this world” (p. 200), what points does she emphasize? What counterarguments might she have considered more specifically? Do you share her concern about where so many top young graduates take their first jobs? Do you worry that you need to compromise your own dreams for practical concerns? Why or why not?

My brother laughed at my nostalgia, reminding me that I could still drive the car when I came home. He didn’t understand that it wasn’t just the driving I’d miss. That it was the tinfoil balls, the New York Times, and the broken speaker; the fingernail marks, the stray cassettes, and the smell of chai. Alone that night and parked in my driveway, I listened to Frank Sinatra with the moon roof slid back.

I worry sometimes that humans are afraid of helping humans. There’s less risk associated with animals, less fear of failure, fear of getting too involved. In war movies, a thousand soldiers can die gruesomely, but when the horse is shot, the audience is heartbroken. It’s the My Dog Skip effect. The Homeward Bound syndrome. When we hear that the lady on the next street over has cancer, we don’t see the entire town flock to her house. We push and shove and wet whales all day, then walk home through town past homeless men curled up on benches—washed up like whales on the curbsides. Pulled outside by the moon and struggling for air among the sewers. They’re suffocating too, but there’s no town assembly line of food. No palpable urgency, no airlifting plane.

16. The last paragraphs of individual stories are worth careful examination and rereading. What details does Keegan set up earlier in each piece to make these endings particularly powerful? How does she seal each story while still using a light hand? When does she allow ambiguity? Which ending do you see as most effective, and why?

I feel like we can do something really cool to this world. And I fear - at twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five - we might forget.

Yet above all this, she insists on vigilance. Gluten is hiding everywhere in everything, and even the tiniest crumb—the tiniest crumb of a crumb—could get me sick. It’s more important than the mere stomach issues; failure to follow a gluten-free diet grossly increases one’s chances of developing thyroid cancer, diabetes, and other life-threatening diseases. These, she taught me, are the real reasons to check and double-check. The reasons she uses separate pasta strainers and knives. I learned to read labels for hidden ingredients, to call the company and ask the source of the caramel color and the modified food starch. To avoid foods fried in the same oil that had fried breaded meat. To speak with chefs at restaurants and ask to use a clean part of the grill, a clean salad bowl, a flourless dressing. We were careful. We were the best. And at home I never, ever got sick.

I confessed that they were too hard to follow, and the summer before my sophomore fall, she sought to fully transform Yale’s food-allergy plan. With her credentials from Boston Children’s Hospital, she arranged meetings with our head chefs and supervisors, getting gluten-free cereals and bagels in dining halls, adding “gluten” labels on every dish’s information cards. It was unbelievable. It was impressive. Watching her make calls, I could see her eyes smile with the smallest hint of pride.

The biggest fight in my relationship with Danny regards his absurd claim that he invited the popular middle school phenomenon of saying "cha-cha-cha" after each phrase of the Happy Birthday song- an idea his ingenious sixth-grade brain allegedly spawned in a New Jersey Chuck E. Cheese and watched spread across 1993 America with an unprecedented rapidity.

Brian's death was the clearest and most horrifying example of my terrific obsession with the unattainable. Alive, his biggest flaw was most likely that he liked me. Dead, his perfections were clearer.

Sorry about that,” Tommy finally says. “Sometimes I just feel so goddamn angry at people.” He forcefully takes off his sailor’s hat and tucks it into his bag. He breathes in deeply and, after a pause, relaxes into a smile. “Whatever. I don’t want to talk about it. No one will want to read about all my stupid emotional stuff. No one cares.

Growing up with an exterminator as a father was always slightly embarrassing for Anna and her brother, Kevin. “I remember,” Tommy begins, “one year when Anna was about eight, and it was ‘bring your daughter to work day.’ That was a big thing back in the eighties,” he chuckles. “Well, I remember Anna came down to breakfast that morning and told me she didn’t want to come.” Tommy half smiles, but shakes his head slightly and closes his eyes for a second. “ ‘Dad-dyyy, bugs are nasty. Why can’t you be a pilot or a doctor or something cool like that?’ I didn’t even argue with her, I just let her go to school.” Tommy sighs, “I told her I was sorry I didn’t have a cooler job.

Tommy suddenly picks up his stuff and starts walking down the stairs. “I’m honest, I’m never late, I respect people, I try my hardest, I’m friendly, I love my wife, I love my children,” he rants as he makes his way out of the building and toward his truck. “It’s just like, no one wants bugs around, so no one wants me around.” Tommy shakes his head and shoves his supplies into the truck. “I mean, why do you think it’s un labeled?” He waves an arm outward toward his truck. “Because people would be embarrassed to have it in their parking lots, that’s why.” He shakes his head, suddenly stops talking, and sighs. “Ehh, stupid landlord. He’s just an asshole anyway. What do I care?” Tommy smiles and his body becomes less tense. “Hey, here’s one I’ve never told you, my dear. What do you get when you cross a centipede and a parrot? . . . A walkie-talkie!” He gags, and bends over laughing. Tommy slides into the driver’s seat of his truck and shuts the door, sealing the plain white shell around him.

I got a personal e-mail and went to their event because I couldn’t believe that they were interested in me and I wanted to find out why,” she said. But when she got there, she wasn’t sure why she’d come in the first place. “I looked around and felt that I not only didn’t belong with the group of people but that I didn’t believe in what the organization stands for or does,” she said. “There’s definitely a compulsion element to it. You feel like so many people are doing it and talking about it all the time like it’s interesting, so you start to wonder if maybe it really is.

I will live for love and the rest will take care of itself

Do you wanna leave soon? No, I want enough time to be in love with everything... and I cry because everything is so beautiful and so short

Brian's death was the clearest and most horrifying example of my terrific obsession with the unattainable