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When I was a boy, I used to wake up thinking that the world was ending. I'd get up and look in the mirror and my eyes were sad.
Benjamin Alire Saenz -
I just drove. I could have driven forever. I don’t know how I managed to find my spot in the desert, but I found it. It was as if I had a compass hidden somewhere inside me. One of the secrets of the universe was that our instincts were sometimes stronger than our minds.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
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Mima was like the tree. In this desert where I’d grown up, Mima had shaded me from the sun. She was a tree. How would I live without that tree?
Benjamin Alire Saenz -
I guess I did miss Dante-even though I tried hard to not think about him. The problem with trying hard not to think about something was that you thought about it even more.
Benjamin Alire Saenz -
The problem is not that I don't love my mother and father. The problem is that I don't know how to love them.
Benjamin Alire Saenz -
Summer was here again. Summer, summer, summer. I loved and hated summers. Summers had a logic all their own and they always brought something out in me. Summer was supposed to be about freedom and youth and no school and possibilities and adventure and exploration. Summer was a book of hope. That's why I loved and hated summers. Because they made me want to believe.
Benjamin Alire Saenz -
Do you think we’ll ever discover all the secrets of the universe?
Benjamin Alire Saenz -
Adam says I isolate. He is addicted to telling me that I spend too much time in my head. It’s an unhealthy behavior. Look, I don’t see how not bothering other people with your screwed-up vision of the world constitutes unhealthy behavior.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
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Just because I'm playing on the other team doesn't mean I'm this pathetic human being who's begging to be loved.
Benjamin Alire Saenz -
You know, it was beautiful to be in that kitchen just then. I guess there are times of quiet beauty in life.
Benjamin Alire Saenz -
Guess that's a part of what the living did, they took care of their dead.
Benjamin Alire Saenz -
It was good to laugh. I wanted to laugh and laugh and laugh until I laughed myself into becoming someone else. The really great thing about laughing was that it made me forget about the strange and awful feeling in my legs. Even if it was only for a minute.
Benjamin Alire Saenz -
Maybe my life isn't all that interesting but at least I'm busy. Busy doesn't mean happy. I know that. But at least I'm not bored. Being bored is the worst.
Benjamin Alire Saenz -
You can’t expect to go both ways when you’re driving on a one-way street.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
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I wondered if my smile was as big as hers. Maybe as big. But not as beautiful.
Benjamin Alire Saenz -
Maybe we don’t always know what we have inside us.
Benjamin Alire Saenz -
That smell—cigarette—it always made me think of him. He smoked his cigarette. I drove. I didn’t mind the silence and the desert and the cloudless sky. What did words matter to a desert?
Benjamin Alire Saenz -
It was warm in the kitchen and I felt safe.
Benjamin Alire Saenz -
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.
Benjamin Alire Saenz -
Change is overrated.
Benjamin Alire Saenz
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It was like letting go of the sky.
Benjamin Alire Saenz -
I’m not into all this academic stuff. Too much analysis. What ever happened to reading a book because you liked it?
Benjamin Alire Saenz -
I wondered how that felt, to really like yourself. And I wondered why some people didn't like themselves and others did. Maybe that's just the way it was.
Benjamin Alire Saenz -
But the thing is that I’m in love with Rafael’s story. I think I understand when Adam says that all our stories are different but in some ways our stories are all the same. I never really got that. But when I start to read Rafael’s journal, it’s as if I can see myself. It’s better than a mirror.
Benjamin Alire Saenz