Crying on the beach in Playa del Carmen. I have so many quotes and thoughts when I get to a laptop.

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PREGAME

You will surely forgive me if I begin this brief time we have together by talking about our enemies. I say our enemies and know that in the many worlds beyond these pages, we are not beholden to each other in whatever rage we3 do or do not share, but if you will, please, imagine with me. -pg 3

You will surely forgive me if I promised we would talk about our enemies when what I meant was that I want to begin this brief time we have together by talking about love, and you will surely forgive me if an enemy stumbles their way into the architecture of affection from time to time. -pg 3

You can always tell who did or didn't grow up playing the dozens by who clutches their pearls when they see some black folks talking shit to each other, to their competition, to the world. -pg 12

And listen, ain't that a kind of love? To say You are worthy of the time it takes to dismantle you. -pg 13

Shit talking is a right, a gift, a mercy with a lineage all its own. -pg 13

There are those who demand to be buried with all their gold on. To reach heaven, perhaps, still wrapped in the arms of their earthly jewels. -pg 17

Have you ever been in the air so long that your feet begin to fall in love with the new familiar, walking along some invisible surface that is surely there, that must be, as there is no other way to describe what miracle keeps you afloat? How long have you been suspended in a place that loves you with the same ferocity and freedom as the ground might, as the grave might, as a heaven that lets you walking in drowning in gold might? -pg 18

"So why would you use us to tell stories to get that fake love now?" -pg 20

I have been better than I have wanted to be at giving in to the foolishness that allows us to sometimes mistake the desire to not be lonely for love. -pg 24

The people we love deserve to return to the places they left with the things they love intact. -pg 28

I will walk slowly through the garden of all that could have killed me but didn't. -pg 35

FIRST QUARTER
CITY AS ITS TRUE SELF

Tourists believe the hood is a monolith, not an ecosystem that can function differently from block to block, from corner to corner. pg 41

The bullet that hit him wasn't meant for him, but the bullet doesn't apologize and isn't especially discerning. The bullet only knows what is in front of it. I don't trust people who don't love a place to understand how that place remembers its dead. -pg 42

They were underdogs because the streets loved them, and the streets can determine who is chosen and who isn't because the streets are where underdogs flourish - n****s who quit something or dropped out of somewhere but still ain't gonna be taken for no fools when it comes to getting to the money a whole lotta folks said they wouldn't ever get to. I propose that above all, you are a reflection of who loves you. -pg 43

I ask you to arrive here, for one night, and never consider the possibility of losing anything or anyone. -pg 44

I propose, once again, that you are, in part, who loves you. Who might step outside of themselves to find whatever will heal you, return you to a place where you are loved. -pg 50

The heart doesn't break all at once. It would be easier that way, cleaner. The process of breaking begins somewhere man y of us can't even recall. It accelerates in busts throughout a life; sometimes it hums along at a steady pace. But with the accumulation of enough pain and the promise of more to come, we can only carry ourselves so far. -pg 52

And I love you for your limits, I love all of us for what we do and don't have in this beautifully unbearable container of heat, of sirens, of bike chains popping and black sneakers that have seen better days. -pg 73

I don't need the elsewhere to be better, I just need it to be somewhere else. -pg 73

Look I love you and so I must tell you that anything that can be taken, will be taken. You are lucky if you survive the forest of reaching hands. The open window and the aching voice that floods a room and holds you firm to the night, thinking of all you have that might be gone upon your waking. -pg 74

Sometimes there are funerals, and sometimes there is nothing. No portal through which grief can be passed, no housewarming for the new grief that furnishes the ever-growing tower that we carry, that we are responsible for, whether we want to be or not. -pg 90

Monuments. In my dreams, we are monuments. We get to be somewhere that is ours, forever. A place no other hands can reach. -pg 93

Some of us grow too large or too accustomed to every kind of pain for our parents to physically punish us in the same way. -pg 105

SECOND QUARTER
FLAWED AND MORTAL GODS

I am convinced that gods are made out of men because men have found no other way to touch their gods. -pg 111

Home isn't a choice one makes; home is a set of circumstances. -pg 113

I came to God once. I made a deal. I said If you give me this, I will give you anything. We both knew I was a liar. I suppose God is under no obligation to be merciful about our deceptions. -pg 126

And I admit, when I say "funny" I mean funny as in "Isn't it funny how that assassin demands answers while holding a loaded gun inside of your open mouth?" I mean funny as in the punchline is not the grave itself but the towering mounds of dirt ready to be heaped upon the coffin. -pg 163

It is good to survive, after all, if one is to be sentenced to living. All I know is a door closed once, and even when it opened, there wasn't enough light to find my way out of the room that consumed me. Forgive me for committing to suffering. I thought it might be the answer. That if I suffered loudly enough, for long enough, I would be owed something from somewhere holy. And isn't it funny, also, to imagine that the only time God judges us is after we've died? -pg 164

THIRD QUARTER
THE MERCY OF EXITS, THE MAGIC OF FRUITLESS PLEADING

I am of a particular emotional makeup, and because of this, I believe that misery doesn't need company as much as I believe that misery is company. Damn good company too, if you can get it honest enough. By this I mean that I get it. The sun dances from behind the gray, and I want the warmth. The trees are trying to fight back to life, and I root for them. But then, I think, what will become of this misery that I've held? That I've kept for myself, that I've made my own? I know my way around this. I want to keep the familiar as much as I want to run toward whatever newness arrives. I want to wallow in the memory, in the reality of what I know. What can only hurt me as much as I allow it to. -pg 174

I am looking for a light so consuming that it overwhelms all absence. -pg 207

What I mean when I say that a villain stays a villain is that our damage remains even after we've been punished for it, and there is very little control any of us have over our own absolution. -pg 219

I am accustomed to the physical act of leaving and being left behind. I like a long, aimless road trip for how it flirts with the act of leaving but never fully commits. You get to try on the outfits of different sunrises through a car window for however long you want, and then you return to the familiar colors of where you are, where your things are, where your people are until they decide to make their exit, for good. -pg 225

I love the dead because we cannot let each other down anymore. I cannot fail you. I am thankful for a leaving that is permanent. It is one thing to be haunted by a life gone and another to be haunted by a life that spins on, happily, without you. -pg 227

FOURTH QUARTER
CITY AS ITS FALSE SELF

When I say that nostalgia is a hustle and we are the hustlers, placing an audience at the mercy of its tools, I mean that we must figure out, together, what we are willing to lie about for the sake of a clean memory. -pg 240

I am not especially easy to fool, but I am a romantic, which I suppose means that at the right hour, I am everyone's fool. -pg 242

You keep the cops out by giving them no reason to come around. The code of a place is so rigid, no one who runs afoul of it can get away for long. We don't fear sirens and badges here. We don't fear each other, either. But if you do the wrong kind of dirt, there is plenty to fear. Ball don't lie, and yet, nothing lies like a city. -pg 244

Someone I loved left me because they said I couldn't envision the future, and therefore they couldn't envision a future with me. -pg 259

It is hard to explain what becomes of rage when someone does not love you as you want them to. -pg 291

There is the feeling of knowing and understanding that you have been crying but not fully grasping the velocity with which the crying has overtaken you until you realize that you are, in fact, gasping in the darkness - a darkness that feels new but has always been there. In these moments, that darkness is a mirror, too. -pg 307

Tell me if you have ever built a heavy out of nothing, and then tell me what it would take for you to look for a new one somewhere else. -pg 313

Understand this: some of our dreams were never your dreams, and will never be. -pg 315