Shaun David Hutchinson

Having choices is the problem. Everything would be easier if someone told me what to do: push the button, stop seeing Marcus, get over Jesse. The problem with choices is that I usually make the wrong ones.

That’s the problem with memories: you can visit them, but you can’t live in them.

“Writing’s like painting. You have to write about yourself before you can write about anything else.”

“There’s an amazing world out there for you to discover, Henry Denton, but you have to be willing to discover yourself first.”

Depression isn’t a war you win. It’s a battle you fight every day. You never get to stop, never get to rest. It’s one bloody fray after another.

Physicists have theorized that we live in an infinite and infinitely expanding universe, and that everything in it will eventually repeat. There are infinite copies of your mom and your dad and your clothes-stealing little sister. There are infinite copies of you. Despite what you’ve spent your entire life believing, you are not a special snowflake. Somewhere out there, another you is living your life. Chances are, they’re living it better. They’re learning to speak French or screwing their brains out instead of loafing on the couch in their boxers, stuffing their face with bowl after bowl of Fruity Oatholes while wondering why they’re all alone on a Friday night. But that’s not even the worst part. What’s really going to send you running over the side of the nearest bridge is that none of it matters. I’ll die, you’ll die, we’ll all die, and the things we’ve done, the choices we’ve made, will amount to nothing.

waiting for electronic bits to zoom through the air and tell you that someone was thinking about you. That for one fleeting moment you were the most significant person in someone else’s insignificant life.

Sometimes I think gravity may be death in disguise. Other times I think gravity is love, which is why love’s only demand is that we fall.

As human beings, we’re born believing that we are the apex of creation, that we are invincible, that no problem exists that we cannot solve. But we inevitably die with all our beliefs broken.

“Sometimes I feel like I’m floating alone in the ocean. Other times I feel like the ocean’s in a paper cup.” He squeezes my hand. “I refuse to end up like my folks. But what if Cloud Lake’s all there is? What if this is it?”

“Would that be so terrible?”

“Not if we’re together, but I’d rather start our lives somewhere else.”

“Where?”

Tommy stretches. He sighs. “Anywhere, Ozzie. Anywhere is better than here