not now, we're chasing history

Only one. Where are the others. Why this luck. Some luck. A halfhearted arrest. Why is that. Is the whole damn country tired. And what is next, is this forever, will she ever see the sky.

I don't like to tell people what to take from my books. I prefer my readers to interpret the words for themselves, to discover the themes and significance through their own reasoning with the information given. But if there is one thing readers take from this book, I hope it is that history matters. Stories matter, and it also matters who is telling these stories. I think about how my parents grew up in a small Arkansas county that had been home to one of the deadliest race massacres in United States history, and how I grew up in a town where a triple lynching had led to the decimation of the Black community decades before I was born, and how for the first twenty-two years of my life, I unknowingly lived three hours away from a neighborhood that was the site of the Tulsa Race Massacre. How could my life, or my ancestors' lives, have been different if just one of those events had turned out differently?

"Bo, I know public demonstrations are more your thing than mine"--that gets a couple of chuckles--"but I want to be more like you. I don't want to apologize about who I am, or how I look, or what I feel. I think you're amazing, and inspiring, and beautiful, and I'm not even a little bit sorry about it. Will you go to prom with me?"

Sometimes it's too much for me. Control--choice--they're a distant dream here. Occasionally, I find them in small rituals. Working out. Praying. Walking circles in the yard, missing the smell of the Mojave wind and the way the Sierra Nevada transformed every sunset into a poem.

This is Aces. Every person I have spent the past four years with. Every person who I have looked in the eye. Sat next to in class. Passed in the hallway. Every person who, all along, wanted to humiliate me, see me work to get to the top, only to tear me down. Every person who knew they could hide behind these masks--online or here, now; a cult, that wants nothing more than to see me and Devon fail.

For years now I have woken and--even before rubbing the sandy night from my eyes--I've dutifully squeezed every bit of subconsciousness I remember onto a page. I have dozens of black books with pages of dreams from November, from June, from college and different hemispheres and hair colors, from falling in and out of love, and memories from Before she died and After, and sometimes it seems like they're trying desperately to tell me something important, and other times it's like radio chitchat about the weather: that is to say, meaningless and brittle, something to fill the empty space between songs.

Everyone had a feeling that God had forsaken us. All the babies had colic. All the livestock had yeast infections. The rumor that God had forsaken us spread through our friends and neighbors and Priests. God's forsaken us, pass it on. In God's absence the girls rolled up their skirts. In God's absence we pierced our ears and sullied the purity of our flesh and bought crypto and wrote autofiction. We played truth or dare. Never have we ever. Marry fuck kill: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We abolished homosexual marriage and then heterosexual marriage and then marriage in general. The nuns, who were of course married to God, filed for divorce. They hired Jewish laywers.

also on the note of London Falling, I cannot tell you how hard I laughed at “, comprehensively.”

One reason that it is so difficult to know precisely what happened at Riverwalk is that Zac was by no means the only impostor in the apartment that night. Verinder Sharma was a leg-breaker posing as a benevolent mentor. Akbar Shamji was a dilettante posing as accomplished entrepreneur. And Zac was just a London teenager, posing as the son of an oligarch. Each was pretending to be something he wasn't, and each was caught up in the glitzy, mercenary aspirational culture of modern London. "It was three bullshit artists, selling air," Rachelle said.

Summer, 1536: he is promoted to Baron Cromwell. He cannot call himself Lord Cromwell of Putney. He might laugh. However. He can call himself Baron Cromwell of Wimbledon. He ranged all over those fields, when he was a boy. The word 'however' is like an imp coiled beneath your chair. It induces ink to form words you have not yet seen, and lines to march across the page and overshoot the margin. There are no endings. If you think so you are deceived as to their nature. They are all beginnings. Here is one.