The personal quirks you’d hoped were endearing turn out to be profoundly irritating to the people around you.

Sleep—when there’s nowhere else to go.

The word practice—cultivating a veneer of respectability while retaining the frisson of artistic endeavor.

Driving back, you remember the hopeful innocent you were just a week ago, still on your way. 

I keep thinking we might be able to reverse-engineer this whole fucking disaster.

1) thought
2) first draft
3) revision
4) deletion

Alone in his hotel room he wrote:
I am strong. I am unafraid.
He took a sip of his drink and added:
I am over it.
He sat back and looked at what he had written.
None of it was true.
But for the first time in years, he could imagine it.

On the fifth anniversary of her mother’s death she found a lump on her breast. There was no one to tell; the roommate-slash-fuckup she occasionally slept with had skipped out in the middle of the night without paying rent. She wasn’t close with anyone at work, and anyway, she’d been laid off three weeks earlier. Yesterday she’d thought, “if one more thing happens, I don’t know what I’ll do.” And she’d been right: she didn’t know what to do.