Benjamin Alire Sáenz

I live in an ecotone. Employment must coexist with goofing off. Responsibility must coexist with irresponsibility.

And prayer? How could you pray to a God you wanted to hit?

..they were always asking me lots of questions. Questions I didn't want to answer. They wanted to get to know me. Yeah, well, I wasn't interested in being known. I wanted to buy a t-shirt that read: I AM UNKNOWNABLE.

What did being connected to the world get you? It got you sadder. Look, the world is not sane. If you stay connected to an insane world, well, you just go crazy. This is not a complicated theory. It's just simple logic.

I hadn't even solved the mystery of my own body.

I wondered what it was like to feel whole, to not feel torn up or stunned out or wigged out or any of those things. I wondered what it was like to walk around the world looking up at the sky instead of searching the ground, eye to eye with things that crawled.

In the distance, I can see a storm coming in, the dark clouds and the lightning on the horizon moving towards me. I wait and I wait and I wait for the storm. And then it comes, and the rains wash away the nightmares and the memories. And I'm not afraid.

I__ not a good kid. Yeah, look, I__ just a piece of paper with the word sad and a bunch of cuss words written on it.A lousy piece of paper. That__ me.A piece of paper that__ waiting to be torn up.

Dad? Dad, no. No. I can't. I can't. Why are you saying these things?""Because I can't stand watching all that loneliness that lives inside you.

I decided that maybe we left each other alone too much. Leaving each other alone was killing us.

So I was the son of a man who had Vietnam living inside him. Yeah I had all kinds of reasons for feeling sorry for myself. Being fifteen didn't help. Sometimes I thought that being fifteen was the worst tragedy of all.

All I knew is that sometimes my father was sad. I hated that he was sad. It made me sad too. I didn't like sad.

I don't know what the exact shape of my life will take--and what the days to come will bring--except i know that i am happy and my heart is still. I know that I have fallen in love with the word surrender and know that I can no longer live in disappointment

I always thought of men as being hard__aybe because I was hard. But there was a softness in Tom that betrayed his large masculine hands and his deep baritone voice. He knew something about love that I didn__. I don__ know where he__ learned it, but it wasn__ something you got from a book, not something you could learn in an online class, not something you could borrow. Maybe it was something you were born with. Some people knew how to love and some people didn__. Tom was the former. I was the latter. I didn__ know which one of us had it worse

But the thing is, I didn't make my friends happy and they didn't make me happy. All we did was get stoned out of our minds. That didn't have anything to do with happiness.

He was still experimenting with kissing girls even though he said he'd rather be kissing boys. That's exactly what he said. I didn't know exactly what to think about that, but Dante was going to be Dante and it I was going to be his friend, I would just have to learn to be okay with it.

I wish I didn__ have a heart that God wrote Sad on.

Grief was a terrible and beautiful thing.