R.J. Anderson

I disliked numbers, and they didn't think much of me either.

I hate it when people talk like friendship is less than other kinds of - as though it's some kind of runner-up prize for people who can't have sex.

I might not be ready to pour out my feelings to the world, but I__ had enough of trying to ignore them.

But there were worse things than disappointment, and I'd lived through several of them already.

I heard the universe as an oratorio sung by a master choir of stars, accompanied by the orchestra of the planets and the percussion of satellites and moons. The aria they performed was a song to break the heart, full of tragic dissonance and deferred hope, and yet somewhere beneath it all was a piercing refrain of glory, glory, glory. And I sensed that not only the grand movements of the cosmos, but everything that had happened in my life, was a part of that song. Even the hurts that seemed most senseless, the mistakes I would have done anything to erase--nothing could make those things good, but good could still come out of them all the same, and in the end the oratorio would be no less beautiful for it.

I realized then that even though I was a tiny speck in an infinite cosmos, a blip on the timeline of eternity, I was not without purpose.

I found her lying naked on the lawn at midnight, can I keep her?

I'd finally reached the end of myself, all my self-reliance and denial and pride unraveling into nothingness, leaving only a blank Alison-shaped space behind. It was finished. I was done.But just as I felt myself dissolving on the tide of my own self-condemnation, the dark waves receded, and I floated into a celestial calm.I saw the whole universe laid out before me, a vast shining machine of indescribable beauty and complexity. Its design was too intricate for me to understand, and I knew I could never begin to grasp more than the smallest idea of its purpose. But I sensed that every part of it, from quark to quasar, was unique and - in some mysterious way - signifi

This is fantastically squalid," said Milo. "We may never get out of here alive.

I don't know how to be anything but pretend," I replied, and it ached in me how true that really was. "But if I could be real, I'd be real for you.

What would happen if you stopped fighting, and gave yourself permission to feel? Not just the good things, but everything?