You are beautiful, all of you.

Don't think for a second that what he says or what she says is true.

You are a shining peak of radiance, emanating the light of a person who is so uniquely you that you cannot be squandered or ignored.

Yours are the body, face, and eyes that someone loves, someone envies,  and someone adores.

There is so much beauty in you.  Just let it shine.

He held her heart from the beginning, and when it finally came time for a decision, he set it down and stepped back.

She had power over him but never had his heart.

If it had been my heart in the balance, I would have made sure I held his too. I would have made sure he knew that his heart would be left, just the same way.

I would abandon that heart, walk away and never look back.

But I have never held a heart in my hands, so who am…

I'm afraid I have to go now, away from this beautiful world. I hope that there is something better waiting for me on the other side of the thin veil of death, but even after all of the Sunday school lessons, I can't quite wrap my mind around what is about to happen.

To my dear family and friends, I wish I could explain to you how this happened or why this happened or how to deal with it. For my sake, do not let my death taint the beauty of your lives; resolve yourselves to…

Janice shuffled through the packets, reading what appeared to be the first entry in the toilet paper journal.

January 30, 1993

It has been so long, so horribly long since I have held

a pen to a page, and now that I am, I hardly have the

time to write because the warden will be coming soon

but I will be in the bathroom conveniently at least I

still have those privileges. Now that I…

If I had been a boy, my name would have been Matthew James because someone in the family had to have at least one of the family names, and they knew they weren't getting another chance. They certainly weren't going to make me a Gerrit or Homer.

Growing up, if I had been a boy, it would have made more sense that I played football every recess. And now, if I were a boy, it would make more sense for me to be an engineer and for me to be so tall and for me to love sports over…

The rooms were stark, almost prison-like. Most patients had very few personal effects and what they did own was closely monitored.

Janice started with the dresser, throwing the majority of its contents into a large garbage bag with a few items landing in the charity pile.

She found them carefully tucked away in the back of the sock drawer. At first, Janice didn't know what she had found; but as she carefully untied the first package, she realized the old woman…

Tonight, I will eat an entire quart of ice cream and feel absolutely no guilt.

I'm justified, you see. I ran 9 miles today, a long run in terms of my recent running days, and I know that I need the calories tonight.

And this boy that I've had a crush on for weeks just told me two days ago that he started dating someone so I'm planning on pity-eating, all alone, just to make myself feel better (or worse).

And yesterday I spent TWELVE hours straight…

Janice was the one who found her. She called the ambulance, the kind that have no reason to turn on sirens. 

And it was Janice who found that she had no one to call regarding the death. There was only one number listed in the "Relatives" column of the sheet filed twenty years ago, and it had long since been disconnected.

Since she had discovered the body and there was no one to call, it was Janice's duty to pack up the tomb and ship it to charities or to the…

She sat for hours by the window, watching the sun hover closer and closer to the water until it collapsed into the lake entirely.

Her meals were brought to her on carts, but she rarely ate any of it. Her breathing was steady, but slow, whining its way out of her wrinkled nose.

No one knew what had happened to her.

And there was no one to call after she watched the sun's collapse for the last time.

There is not much here, in this town that the railroad neglected.

The story goes that they needed a stop along here, and the little town decided not to join the railroad cult. The railroad didn't like that, so they built up their own town with a station just across the swamp.

My little defiant town is still here, and the railroad town is too, but the swamp has turned into a sprawling campus, its own mini-metropolis.

And now I go to the swamp to…

I've been gone so long that I feel like the words cannot spill out neatly onto the page anymore. There are too many equations in my brain, rattling around and crowding out the wordiness of my thoughts, the girth of my being.

I've been gone so long that I cannot construct the sentences I want to say, I cannot complete my thoughts, I cannot focus.

He's been gone so long that I cannot remember what it was like to have him, I cannot remember his words, I cannot…

I never meant to like him. Well, that's a lie. At the beginning, it didn't matter yet because I hadn't Facebook-stalked him so I didn't know about the girl he's dated for almost five years.

After that, I tried my best: listed reasons I should not like him, avoided alcohol whenever he was around, tried to hide away and do my own thing. But he's always there, in class or doing homework or texting me or laughing at my ridiculousness or giving me rides home or going to the same…

My perfect city would have only mixed income housing, with retail space nearby so that no one has to travel too far to get what they need. It would transform old, beautiful buildings into trendy new spaces for business development and spacious lofts. My city would have public transportation with an incremented cost structure so that people have to pay only what they can afford. My city would have old neighborhoods with new life in them, old buildings that people take care of, an old feeling…

My poor little Mr. Basil has been through so much. The first week I brought him home, I forgot to water him three out of the seven days; his little hands started turning brown so I pulled some off to use in soup.

Then there was that traumatic car ride, the one in which Mr. Basil got stepped on by my brother. He was admonished, but poor Mr. Basil nearly lost a limb. 

And now the storm hit him, and Mr. Basil can hardly stand. Leaning against the wall for support,…

Graduate school awaits me just beyond the curtain of sleep. I have been oriented; I have my books; I have my schedule. My notebooks are to be purchased tomorrow (yet another little thing that slipped my mind when I went on my first, second, and third Target trips). 

And now, all I have left to do is wait. Wait for my last first day of school. 

I think I'll take a picture to send to my mother, while I wait for the bus to campus.

The small stage was set right on the street between the little shops that had been there since the railroad first made that town a place. The railroad still rolls through, but now the town has been swamped by the university and its students and its student housing and is less a place than ever.

But here, on this little street, at this little festival, for this little night, the streets were alive again. The blues, the jazz, the music drew them in, and the town forgot that it…

She had that sort of electric, no, more magnetic personality. Everyone was simply drawn to her without realizing why or what was happening. Her conversation was easy, her laugh was flirty, her face was pretty, her body was sexy, and everyone, men and women alike, seemed taken by her.

And one day, a man, a simple man, the type of man who wears brown tweed suit jackets with yellow shirts and blue bow ties, the type of man who wears bowler's caps to hide a ferociously bald head,…

With a set of quick pulls, I released the blanket, then the sheets from my bed's grasp. The sunbeam peered through the window overhead, spotlighting the flecks of dust stirred by the sudden movement. They scattered in the sunbeam, each turning to its own floaty path toward resettlement. 

Carefully, I folded the blanket and sheets into perfect squares and placed them within one of the boxes gathering in my home.

I thought about the dust and how I feel like a…

I never told you that you remind me of a groaning bear when you answer the phone in your throaty voice, used only for special greetings. I never told you how funny I think it is that you learned German. I never told you that I was not okay with you being an Abercrombie and Fitch model. I never told you how overjoyed I was when you quit.

Worst of all, I never told you that I've liked you for months.

All I told you is that it's too late, I'm moving, I don't want…

I will miss the community, always present and never questioned; teammates, relatives, choir girls, engineers, all making my college life so full and vibrant.

I will miss the ease of talking to professors when I got stumped, or knowing that there were ten other engineers in the lab who I could count on to make fun of me and then help me.

I will miss my nights at Founder's chatting with a stranger or a friend, not caring who it is or what we talk about, just there…