It was a beautiful night. They reminisced about their childhoods.
But the talk always went back to Janet.
They knew it was time for Gary to meet her. Gary had second thoughts. He knew Janet must be something special if Max kept mentioning her.

“Are you ready to meet my lady?” Max asked him.

Gary was not ready. But what choice did he have?

I dressed myself in flowers. But you can’t do such a thing and expect to be left alone. Forget about the bees. People want to take selfies with you.
Some people get pissed off that you ripped the flowers from their original origins A cop comes by and gives you a citation.

I enjoyed our get-together last Saturday. I don’t know what I expected. I guess I expected a fight to erupt between us.
But instead we shared hors d’oeuvres and laughter. We cried too. I think I enjoyed the crying more than the laughter because the tears came on the tail of the laughter. Somehow, almost in the blink of an eye, I realized, through tears, through previous heartbreak, through eventual maturity, how much I loved you.

These are words I can never forget. They are stamped on my heart, they course through my blood. I cannot vomit them.

But I can say them to others, in the way they were sent to me. I can impress these words on others. I care about others.

What can we gather from this asking of our family and friends?
The answers they give are obvious.  The answers always start in your head–and its always in their voices.Therefore you can never really ask yourself questions of them without them answering before you’ve had a chance to ask them.

You’re going to be better at things than I ever was. I’m telling my nephew this. I really believe what I’m saying. I don’t think he does, He can’t even drive or work or vote or die for his country yet. It’s the worse for him, he thinks.
But I know better.

She used to love the rain. But now any droplets from the heavens above reminded her of Jose. Her Joe. Her great love. Her everything. Now all she had was rain.
Which felt like everything she missed about him. His clarity and gentleness and his wet and wild nature.

Tepid water greeted me from landing. It was a small pool before me but I was easily able to cover my feet, to feel the lap of luxury, to smell the fragrance of care and delicacy. This was my life.

A stub. That’s it. That is word I’d been hunting for all day. I was worried that if I had not found this word, it would have kept me up all night.
But now that I have found this word. I do not why I was looking it. Looking for meaning will be an all night affair.

Everything around you, they say, is just a reflection of your life. And life happens so quickly so that when you look back, as if looking from the backseat from a fast moving car, you see it unspooling behind you, life. It goes so damn fast.
I’m not asking life to stop. Or even to slow down. I’m just asking myself not to look back. But I can’t help it.
Yes, you can, my friend Joe says. Joe is an old man who can say anything he wants and he says memories are just Twinkies–those little soft killer-cakes that I never much cared for.
And that’s your problem, he says off my dislike of Twinkies. You never much cared for your life either he adds, with a wink.
A winkie, I call it.