Phantom Limb Quotes

She never got a chance to fall out of love, to do it properly, slowly and thoroughly, and the result was he was like a phantom limb. Gone but still there. And like a true phantom limb, the preponderance of feelings associated with him were painful.

I want to talk to her. I want to have lunch with her. I want her to give me a book she just read and loved. She is my phantom limb, and I just can’t believe I’m here without her.”- on losing her best friend

It's not easy losing someone," she said. "It never goes away, does it?" "The Phantom Pain, they call it," I said. "Like amputees get when they can still feel their missing limbs.

It isn't accurate to say that my heart stops, because really I feel it's existence intensely, a phantom limb.

I wish I didn't have to think about you. You wanted to impress me; well, I'm not impressed, I'm disgusted...You wanted to make damn good and sure I'd never be able to turn over in bed again without feeling that body beside me, not there but tangible, like a leg that's been cut off. Gone but the place still hurts.

But mostly I wondered why the head could move so swiftly while the heart dragged its feet. I still loved him. It felt like anything else permanent that has gone missing; a lost tooth, a severed leg. You might know better, but that doesn’t keep your tongue from poling at the hole in your gum, or your phantom limb from aching.

The thing is, you can cut off a couple passions and only focus on one, but after a while, you’ll start to feel phantom limb pain.

Meg was going to have to learn for herself what Laurie had figured out over the summer — that it was better to leave well enough alone, to avoid unnecessary encounters with people you’d left behind, to not keep poking at that sore tooth with the tip of your tongue. Not because you didn’t love them anymore, but because you did, and because that love was useless now, just another dull ache in your phantom limb.

Like what, baby? Like that you miss me?” She started to protest but he cut her off. “Do not say a word. Just listen a minute, if you can. I miss you too, like a fucking phantom limb, do you understand? You are a crucial, functioning part of me, always will be. But I get it. I’m a shit. I won’t deny. But I’ll never, ever be happy or complete without you.

Here’s the truth about healing. It’s a fucking myth—an idea they try to sell you on to keep you from killing yourself. You love someone and they leave, but they never entirely go away. You feel them there, acutely, like an amputated limb.

You're my phantom limb, Mouse. I keep looking for you. I forget. I feel stupid, Mouse. Haunt me, find me, come back from wherever you are. Be with me.

[Tessa] knew about phantom limbs [....] Her cheek, where the Englishman's fingers had been, did not exactly ache ... but very strangely, most curiously ... it felt.

What puzzled Abel about life was how much one forgot but then lived with anyway—like phantom limbs, he supposed.

Oedipa sat on the earth, ass getting cold, wondering whether, as Driblette had suggested that night from the shower, some version of herself hadn’t vanished with him. Perhaps her mind would go on flexing psychic muscles that no longer existed; would be betrayed and mocked by a phantom self as the amputee is by a phantom limb. Someday she might replace whatever of her had gone away by some prosthetic device, a dress of a certain color, a phrase in a letter, another lover.

Martin said, "It feels as though part of my self has detached and gone to Amsterdam, where it—she—is waiting for me. Do you know about phantom-limb syndrome?" Julia nodded. "There's pain where she ought to be. It's feeding the other pain, the thing that makes me wash and count and all that. So her absence is stopping me from going to find her. Do you see?

She suffered from the opposite of "phantom limb" syndrome; something essential appeared to be present, but it was not.

I once saw a show about an amputee who lost his leg and still feels it. He actually wakes up at night to scratch his leg as if it’s still there, attached to him. They call it a phantom limb. I would be like that. A phantom draki, tormented with the memory of what I once was.

The heart did ache, actually. She felt a dull grind of lack somewhere near her diaphragm, a pain that occupied the space of something removed. A phantom limb. A scratchy hunger. The wasting muscle fatigue of want.

There should be a word for it. That phantom limb, reaching out from your chest, towards things you’ll never have.

The technology has become like a phantom limb, it is so much a part of them. These young people are among the first to grow up with an expectation of continuous connection: always on, and always on them. And they are among the first to grow up not necessarily thinking of simulation as second best. All of this makes them fluent with technology but brings a set of new insecurities.

I didn’t have room inside me for any more pain. As it turned out, though, I was wrong about that.

Just as there are phantom limbs there are phantom histories, histories that are severed and discarded, but linger on as thwarted possibilities an compelling nostalgias.

if someone you loved died, someone who you were really close to, would they be like a phantom limb, still attached to you?

Mourning is never really complete. The mappings of the old play remain in the cortex, like those mappings of the phantom limb.

She can feel her vanished talent like a phantom limb, the empty ache of its subtraction from the short list of her assets, and she knows with spiteful certainty that it is gone for good.

...This fear was unbearable. It unwrapped who she was, as neatly as he'd unwound her bandage, leaving too much pain and ugliness exposed. Nerve endings; he'd said they were the problem [causing phantom pain in the amputated limb]." Things that cut off, that ended abruptly or died--like parents and marriages--kept hurting forever.

If something is unbearable, then how do you bear it? It’s an oxymoron. And yet I was here, wasn’t I? Somehow I was bearing it.

I watched [her] from the window, my hand pressing hard into the glass. There should be a word for it. That phantom limb, reaching out from your chest, towards things you’ll never have. She crossed the road with wide, lovely strides, and I always wonder what she went on to. The last shred of sunlight caught her hair when she turned the corner, like the start of one thing and the end of another. The dusk itself. I never saw her again.

...for most people in the [Jewish] Ghetto [of Warsaw] nature lived only in memory -- no parks, birds, or greenery existed in the Ghetto -- and they suffered the loss of nature like a phantom-limb pain, an amputation that scrambled the body's rhythms, starved the senses, and made basic ideas about the world impossible for children to fathom.

There was life before you, and then life with you. There wasn’t supposed to be life after you.

I want to talk to her. I want to have lunch with her. I want her to give me a book she just read and loved. She is my phantom limb, and I can’t believe I’m here without her.

When people say spirituality in the U.S. it usually refers to the phantom limb that they develop in the absence of culture.

It is an aspect of Kenya I am always acutely aware of - and crave, because I don't have it all. My third language, Gikuyu, is nearly non-existent; I can't speak it. It is a phantom limb...

To someone who has not had a parent stolen from them, I can only attempt to explain how it feels. It’s like having part of yourself hacked off without warning. Afterwards, they become like a phantom limb: you’re sure they’re still present because you can feel them, you communicate with them, but you just can’t see them.

No one was more proud of me than I was of myself.

I line my pills up in formation, like they’re about to be inspected. It’s time for roll call, motherfuckers: Zoloft for depression (Here!), Abilify for depression (Here!), Klonopin for anxiety (Here!), Oleptro and Lunesta for sleep (Here! Here!), Neurontin for phantom limb pain (Here!), ibuprofen for TBI headaches (Here!). If I stare at the pills long enough, they start floating like tiny stars in the sky.

We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, of an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet. We could have fancied ourselves the first of men taking possession of an accursed inheritance, to be subdued at the cost of profound anguish and of excessive toilo. But suddenly, as we struggled round a bend, there would be a glimpse of rush walls, of peaked grass-roofs, a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling, under the droop of heavy and motionless foliage. The steamer toiled along slowly on the edge of a black and incomprehensible frenzy. The prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us - who could tell? We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings; we glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men would before an enthousiastic outbreak in a madhouse.

I mean, we don’t have to worry about it until winter, anyway,” she said. “I was just wondering if you felt cured.” I didn’t know what to tell her. I didn’t feel cured. I felt like what Cole said —almost cured. A war survivor with a phantom limb. I still felt that wolf that I’d been: living in my cells, sleeping uneasily, waiting to be coaxed out by weather or a rush of adrenaline or a needle in my veins. I didn’t know if that was real or suggested. I didn’t know if one day I would feel secure in my skin, taking my human body for granted. “You look cured,” Grace said. Just her face was visible at the end of the shower curtain, looking in at me. She grinned and I yelled. Grace reached in just far enough to shut off the tap. “I’m afraid,” she said, whipping the shower curtain open all the way and presenting me with my towel, “this is the sort of thing you’ll have to put up with in your old age.” I stood there, dripping, feeling utterly ridiculous, Grace standing opposite, smiling with her challenge. There was nothing for it but to get over the awkwardness. Instead of taking the towel, I took her chin with my wet fingers and kissed her. Water from my hair ran down my cheeks and onto our lips. I was getting her shirt all wet, but she didn’t seem to mind. A lifetime of this seemed rather appealing. I said gallantly, “That better be a promise.

It's not easy losing someone," she said. "It never goes away, does it?" "The Phantom Pain, they call it," I said. "Like amputees get when they can still feel their missing limbs.

God, I miss you,” she said. “Missed? Or miss?” “Miss.” “But I’m right here,” I said into her hair. “I miss you anyway.

It was like shoveling smoke.

My dreams were of beginnings without endings.

Local grandmas came in and out of our clinic bringing homemade cookies and fudge, because nothing soothes phantom limb pain better than a homemade brownie.

It's really just the memory of a river. All Southern California waterways have become like phantom limbs. We might feel that they're still there, but it's just an illusion cast in cement.

From that very first night at the St. Regis, you have filled my brain, leaving no room for anyone else. Even with an ocean separating us, I could feel you, like the ache of a phantom limb.

There is a rustle of dead leaves. Dried sap, a branch crack, the whirring teeth of Mr. Omaru's saw. My father--my real father--is a limb that got axed off the family tree a long time ago now. My mother coughs and cleans phantom juices off her silver with a cloth doily. My sisters clench their knives.

But the longing was the phantom ache of an amputated limb. It was part of her, and most of the time she didn't notice. But certain moments were like reaching for something with a hand that wasn't there.

Neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran’s work with phantom limbs seems to confirm the brain’s remarkable ability to create a sense of cognitive unity even if the reality (of many selves, and of many layers of consciousness) is more complex.

It would hurt someone normal,” I whispered. “I’m not normal. It isn’t like a phantom limb, something you had, used, needed and missed when it was gone. I never had that. I never had love. Devotion. Loyalty. You can’t miss something you’ve never had.

If surgeons know they are going to amputate a limb, they now often numb the nerves in the affected limb over a period of days beforehand to prepare the brain for the oncoming loss of feeling. The practice has been found to greatly reduce phantom limb pain.

With my temporary malfunctioning powers, I somehow felt empty, as if a vital part of me had escaped. I never realized how hollow I’d feel without my abilities. It almost felt like I had a phantom limb; I could feel it there, but I couldn’t do anything with it.

It has been a long time since I've been in France. I miss the food like a phantom limb.' ... 'I shall bring you our best dishes,' he promised. 'And the wine to pair with them," she said. He feigned exasperation. 'But of course, he said, 'would I blaspheme?'... She ate, her eyes half closed. All along, she'd known Lotto was with her, across the table, enjoying her food with her. He would've loved this night. Her dress, the food, the wind. The lust welled in her until it was almost unbearable. If she looked up, she knew she would see only an empty chair. She would not look up.

Still, she experienced a pang, like a spasm in an organ that had been removed or a cramp in a phantom limb. It faded quickly, and she knew that was the last pain of its kind she would feel. A woman much like her had once loved a man who looked like him. Neither of those people existed anymore.

I’ve thought about him a lot throughout my life. Like pain for a phantom limb, absent fathers have a really cute way of invading your thoughts. Father’s Day? Not my favorite. Even those sneaky questions at the doctor’s office. Father’s health history? Um, bad at commitment but with a formidable libido?

[Kinsey's studies included] stutterers, amputees, paraplegics, even those with cerebral palsy were observed. Kinsey wanted to document the full spectrum of human sexuality, but it was more than that. He believed these people might have things to teach us about the physiology of sex. And he was right. These groups alerted Kinsey--and the scientific community as a whole--to the complicated and crucial role of the central nervous system in sex and reproduction. Kinsey had noted that a stutterer in the throes of sexual abandon may temporarily lose his stutter. Similarly, the phantom limb pain some amputees feel temporarily disappears. Even the muscle spasticity of cerebral palsy may be briefly quieted. The body's limiting factors seem to get shut off. The organism is driven toward nature's singular goal--conception, the passing on of one's genes--and anything that stands in the way is pushed into the background.

I drop into my chair, breathe in, let it out. Even now, with so many years gone, the memories are tricky. Like the ache of a phantom limb, the source of the pain may be gone, but the reminder of what’s been lost, so sudden and so keen, takes me unaware. I sit with that pain a moment, waiting for it to fade. Afternoon

I could never quite figure out if I needed to rescue Dara or be rescued from her.

She picked me up, dusted me off, and kicked my ass. Maybe we all need that from time to time. If we’re lucky, there’s someone there who cares enough to do it.

It’s not easy losing someone,” she said. “It never goes away, does it?” “The Phantom Pain, they call it,” I said. “Like amputees get when they can still feel their missing limbs.

All I wanted was for things to be like they used to be. Except for all the parts that couldn't be. Which I guess, was almost all of them.

I would like you all to try and remember that you are not your mental illness. Your mental illness is only a part of you.

I didn’t know how someone could be so sure of themselves without someone else defining them.

if you ask me if i am fluent in Spanish i will tell you my Spanish is an itchy phantom / limb--reaching for words & only finding air

You really could do it — you’re just too dumb to know it.

So while my body was to be regarded as a temple, hers was more like a motel for transients.

When we were kids, chocolate was one of the four major food groups.

You love someone and they leave, but they never entirely go away. You feel them there, acutely, like an amputated limb.

of course the edges of the wound struggle to close up and the clock wants to be set going (how awkward to be pointing permanently to half past one) amputated limbs feel phantom pain

Maybe that’s what marriage was, in essence — an unspoken agreement regarding division of neuroses and quirks so that the bases were covered and neither partner stepped on the other’s toes.

It is life and death, Life like you are left With a phantom limb: To lose your wife Or your best friend - With the right leg gone - Attempting to feel, A tempting to mend - Or an arm stretched strong - Our tendencies to steal, Thence heal the way it ends; Prolonging as we reach back again, But then again, So far? See, to reject what is real, My love, has been Our greatest sin

The space center's proximity to my backyard came to signify an intersection between heaven and hell. Florida was somewhere between the two; it was America's phantom limb, a place where spaceships were catapulted out into the cosmos. Alligators emerged from brackish water. Vultures and hawks circled above. Mosquitoes patrolled the atmosphere at eye level. We shared an ocean with sharks and dolphins. There were no seasons, only variations of humidity. Time slithered, festering in a damp wake of recollections. I believed in the Bermuda Triangle. I thought it would move in over Florida one night. By dusk an unknown force would vaporize us through a tear in the atmosphere. We'd be stuck, wandering in a parallel version of the same place, unaware that we were dead but dreaming. People came here to vanish.

I’m starting to think,” he eventually continued, “that maybe we leave parts of ourselves behind in certain situations—some essential piece of ourselves that we have to cut off, otherwise there’s no way out. The future becomes a kind of journey to discover what you might actually have left behind and what you’re supposed to do about it. It’s more than trauma. It’s like a phantom limb, but with a piece of your soul.

The whole notion of pet having was irrational after all. Why on earth would you attach yourself to something biologically predetermined to die before you? It was crazy. Becoming attached just guaranteed a painful amputation somewhere down the road, and there you’d be, this phantom limb in your head—this active absence—following you around, only to disappear whenever you turned around to look at it. Pets—and the acquiring thereof—was just a setup for gratuitous grief.

Here’s the truth about healing. It’s a fucking myth — an idea they try to sell you on to keep you from killing yourself. You love someone and they leave, but they never entirely go away. You feel them there, acutely, like an amputated limb.

We ache for this feeling, but it’s everywhere. Booze, drugs, sex, sport, art, prayer, music, meditation, virtual reality. Kids, hyperventilating, spinning in circles, feel oneness. Why William James called it the basic lesson of expanded consciousness—just tweak a few knobs and levers in the brain and bam. So the drop, the comedown, it’s not that we miss oneness once it’s gone; it’s that we suddenly can’t feel what we actually know is there. Phantom limb syndrome for the soul.

Going through the pass, which demands a sort of swastika maneuvering in order to debouch free and clear on the high plateau, I had the impression of wading through phantom seas of blood; the earth was not parched and convulsed in the usual Greek way but bleached and twisted as must have been the mangled, death-stilled limbs of the slain who were left to rot and give their blood here in the merciless sun to the roots of the wild olives which cling to the steep mountain slope with vulturous claws.

Sometimes I hear Mark laugh, and some days in the car the right song will come on the satellite radio and I'll feel him there tingling like a phantom limb. Like he's sitting there next to me in the dark. But I know that's not so. And I know that when you die there's not even darkness, and I know Mark and me won't meet on some cloud or in some pit of fire. And I guess that's a good thing. I couldn't take those eyes seeing what's become of me, those eyes looking down at my hands and my chewed-up ragged nails.

We were battered and dinged, both well past the weight limit in personal baggage. And, like the rest of humanity, it would be our destiny to be tossed and torn by events unseen and unplanned. But that didn’t stop me from hoping we could somehow navigate it together.

One of the most severe and challenging of all pains is said to be phantom limb pain, when the sufferer perceives agonies in a part of the body that has been lost to accident or amputation. It is an obvious irony that one of the greatest pains we feel can be in a part of us that is no longer there. Worse, unlike normal pain, which usually abates as a wound heals, phantom pain may go on for a lifetime. No one can yet explain why. One theory is that in the absence of receiving any signal from the nerve fibers in the missing body part, the brain interprets this as an injury so severe that the cells have died, and so sends out an unending call of distress, like a burglar alarm that won’t turn off. If surgeons know they are going to amputate a limb, they now often numb the nerves in the affected limb over a period of days beforehand to prepare the brain for the oncoming loss of feeling. The practice has been found to greatly reduce phantom limb pain.

Trees, trees, millions of trees, massive, immense, running up high; and at their foot, hugging the bank against the stream, crept the little begrimed steamboat, like a sluggish beetle crawling on the floor of a lofty portico. It made you feel very small, very lost, and yet it was not altogether depressing, that feeling. After all, if you were small, the grimy beetle crawled on--which was just what you wanted it to do. Where the pilgrims imagined it crawled to I don't know. To some place where they expected to get something, I bet! For me it crawled toward Kurtz--exclusively; but when the steam-pipes started leaking we crawled very slow. The reaches opened before us and closed behind, as if the forest had stepped leisurely across the water to bar the way for our return. We penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness. It was very quiet there. At night sometimes the roll of drums behind the curtain of trees would run up the river and remain sustained faintly, as if hovering in the air high over our heads, till the first break of day. Whether it meant war, peace, or prayer we could not tell. The dawns were heralded by the descent of a chill stillness; the woodcutters slept, their fires burned low; the snapping of a twig would make you start. We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet. We could have fancied ourselves the first of men taking possession of an accursed inheritance, to be subdued at the cost of profound anguish and of excessive toil. But suddenly, as we struggled round a bend, there would be a glimpse of rush walls, of peaked grass-roofs, a burst of yells, a whirl of black limbs, a mass of hands clapping, of feet stamping, of bodies swaying, of eyes rolling, under the droop of heavy and motionless foliage. The steamer toiled along slowly on the edge of a black and incomprehensible frenzy. The prehistoric man was cursing us, praying to us, welcoming us--who could tell? We were cut off from the comprehension of our surroundings; we glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse. We could not understand, because we were too far and could not remember, because we were traveling in the night of first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign--and no memories.

Oedipa spent the next several days in and out of libraries and earnest discussions with Emory Bortz and Genghis Cohen. She feared a little for their security in view of what was happening to everyone else she knew. The day after reading Blobb's Peregrinations she, with Bortz, Grace, and the graduate students, attended Randolph Driblette's burial, listened to a younger brother's helpless, stricken eulogy, watched the mother, spectral in afternoon smog, cry, and came back at night to sit on the grave and drink Napa Valley muscatel, which Driblette in his time had put away barrels of. There was no moon, smog covered the stars, all black as a Tristero rider. Oedipa sat on the earth, ass getting cold, wondering whether, as Driblette had suggested that night from the shower, some version of herself hadn't vanished with him. Perhaps her mind would go on flexing psychic muscles that no longer existed; would be betrayed and mocked by a phantom self as the amputee is by a phantom limb. Someday she might replace whatever of her had gone away by some prosthetic device, a dress of a certain color, a phrase in a ' letter, another lover. She tried to reach out, to whatever coded tenacity of protein might improbably have held on six feet below, still resisting decay-any stubborn quiescence perhaps gathering itself for some last burst, some last scramble up through earth, just-glimmering, holding together with its final strength a transient, winged shape, needing to settle at once in the warm host, or dissipate forever into the dark. If you come to me, prayed Oedipa, bring your memories of the last night. Or if you have to keep down your payload, the last five minutes-that may be enough. But so I'll know if your walk into the sea had anything to do with Tristero. If they got rid of you for the reason they got rid of Hilarius and Mucho and Metzger-maybe because they thought I no longer needed you. They were wrong. I needed you. Only bring me that memory, and you can live with me for whatever time I've got. She remembered his head, floating in the shower, saying, you could fall in love with me. But could she have saved him? She looked over at the girl who'd given her the news of his death. Had they been in love? Did she know why Driblette had put in those two extra lines that night? Had he even known why? No one could begin to trace it. A hundred hangups, permuted, combined-sex, money, illness, despair with the history of his time and place, who knew. Changing the script had no clearer motive than his suicide. There was the same whimsy to both. Perhaps-she felt briefly penetrated, as if the bright winged thing had actually made it to the sanctuary of her heart-perhaps, springing from the same slick labyrinth, adding those two lines had even, in a way never to be explained, served him as a rehearsal for his night's walk away into that vast sink of the primal blood the Pacific. She waited for the winged brightness to announce its safe arrival. But there was silence. Driblette, she called. The signal echoing down twisted miles of brain circuitry. Driblette! But as with Maxwell's Demon, so now. Either she could not communicate, or he did not exist.

with every vet Jed knew. He’d taken a bullet through the left eye, which was bad enough, but then the round’s diagonal trajectory had cored down and out the back of his head. In an instant, his left eye was jelly and his right occipital lobe went from functional to oatmeal. Technically, his right eye still worked, but the brain damage meant that, after ’Nam, he couldn’t read or recognize words. Color was gone, too. His waking world had existed in ashy shades of gray, although his dreams and the flashbacks were always in Technicolor. Worse, his brain had conjured eerie shimmers the Navy shrinks said were hallucinations, like visual phantom limbs. Like Grace, though … these days, he was different. Now he stood, looking up at that distant cabin. Oh, he was still blind in that left eye, the eyeball itself long gone and the socket filled with a plastic implant sheathed with flesh. He never had gotten around to getting fitted for an artificial eye, maybe because he didn’t mind making other people uncomfortable. Vietnam was wedged in his brain, good and tight, like a stringy piece of meat caught between his teeth that wouldn’t be dislodged for love or money. So why should everybody else forget if he couldn’t? But his good right eye still worked, nowadays better than ever, and that was what he aimed at the

Just before dawn, he received his final visitors. They were the same every night: a trio of cardboard robots, painted dull silver. Of the costumes’ occupants, John could see very little: pallid lips and burst blood vessels glimpsed through mouth and eye slits. The tiny automatons moved on stiffened limbs, trudging forward to claim their prizes. They held plastic garbage bags, quarter-filled with fresh blood. Shivering, John tossed them some Smarties and slammed the door. Something about this last group always unnerved him.

You don't limp at all. Your recovery is going well." "Yes." Though whether someone ever fully recovered from losing a limb, he didn't know. He sure as hell hadn't. It had been five years, and still there were days when the pain in his nonexistent leg was enough to drive him out of his mind.

I couldn’t imagine the pain that he had caused Zoey, and it was clear that it had lingered like a phantom limb. If he'd simply broken up with her, she would have been able to process her grief. Instead, she was left trying to make sense of two completely different sets of information. There were the memories of her fiancé making her feel special, valuable and important, and then there was all of the inferred information brought on by his absence that implied just the opposite. But that second set of information existed without any confirmation to make it strong enough to stand up against the original memories that he'd forged with her.

He had drive and hunger somewhere, like a phantom limb, agitating faintly away in his gut. He’d been an ambitious young man, he’d gotten drunk just looking at the constantly changing face of the churning, radiant world.

The alarm on his watch sounded, signaling the end of our break. We didn’t take our lunch in the break room anymore. We retreated to his white Honda to eat in private. We started doing it shortly after our first date as a way to spend time together, and we’d been doing it ever since. We were both busy balancing school and work and cherished our alone time during lunch. We put our stuff away and headed back inside

if a person has an arm or leg amputated, we know that they will still have sensations in the missing limb.  It may ache or itch, for example.  This is called "phantom limb" syndrome.  The person is actually feeling these sensations in the Light Body of the missing arm or leg. The Light Body can feel things! And

Originality is merely a minor, secondary bonus to the pleasure of thought. Individuality, too, is a secondary aspect of the will and desire. The will is never mine; desire is never mine. For them to be will and desire, they have to circulate and be exchanged as symbolic material. For want of this symbolic devolution, we operate a technical transfer of all these functions on to machines — a transference of the human on to the inhuman. Now, if some human being thinks for me, nothing is lost. He is not lost, neither am I. Whereas if a machine thinks in my stead, we are both lost. In fact, this stage of the transference on to the machine is past. Today, it is machines which transfer their functions on to man. Man's fetishization of the machine has been succeeded by the fetishization of man by the machine. Today, it is man who has become the object of the perverse desire of the machine, of its desire to function at all costs. The machine is no longer an excrescence or a protruberance of man – it is man who is now merely the sex organ of the machine (Burroughs). And this is still quite a large claim, for what sex is the machine? Man has, rather, become the inflatable prosthesis of a sexless machine – the phantom limb of a useless function. The infinite degree, the degree zero, degree Xerox of the libido. Among those devices whose virtual libido man stokes up, there is of course the computer, of which man is the unconscious masturbator and his brain a hyper-object of concupiscence, but there is also the spectacularized body of woman, become a bachelor machine, a promotional and pornographic hypostasis, of which man is merely the sexless operator, the slavish voyeur, the auto-decoder.

A person can become a part of you as real as your arm or leg, and even though Jesse is dead, I still feel the weight of that phantom limb.

I understood why Emily spent so much time sleeping. It was the closest you could get to death without physically dying.

Her dad bought her a new car. One with an automatic transmission. She dubbed it the Stupidmobile.

Could you please just tell me about the lesbian sex and help me take my mind off my troubles?

What I wouldn’t have given for this moment to be happening without her fucking boyfriend there.

Let’s be the people who have all the fun.

And then there was Dara, the most talented one of us all, swimming on the “B” relay team, in early heats, battling it out with — and often losing to — girls who may have had two arms but didn’t have one-tenth her strength and skill. If I’d been her, I would’ve wanted to get as far away from swimming as possible. But she clung to it as if it were all there was in the world. And maybe for her, it was. And the thing was, she was still good — not the best, but better than many, even if she was technically handicapped.

It was fading fast, but I could still hear his voice, still see his face, and I clung to the filaments of the other world until there were no strands left to cling to. It was the best thing and the worst thing, when he appeared in dreams: Being with him again was such an astonishing joy. But then, waking and remembering. No matter how much time passed, it blindsided me. Waking up from a dream and realizing he was dead never failed to feel new and terrible.

I was thinking less and less about whatever used to occupy my preadolescent mind and more and more about stuff that would have made Meg blush if she knew. Like how she’d look in a bikini that coming summer. And the way she smelled, all warm sun and green apples and something heady, like a secret I wanted in on.

Choosing her probable wrath over her possible death, I got up and called 911.

It started the way so many good things do: with bacon.