[b]Neil Gaiman
You got a lifetime. No more. No less.[/b]
As though we can actually know this. But, sure, no doubt about it.
What a refreshing mind you have, young man. There really is nothing quite like total ignorance, is there?
Let’s think of something.
It’s easy, there’s a trick to it, you do it or you die.
Let’s file this one under “a stacked deck”.
I sat in the dark and thought: There’s no big apocalypse. Just an endless procession of little ones.
Some barely worth mentioning at all. And not just mine.
Stories are webs, interconnected strand to strand, and you follow each story to the center, because the center is the end. Each person is a strand of the story.
Just one more thing to get entangled in.
Have you ever been in love? Horrible, isn’t it? It makes you so vulnerable. It opens your chest and it opens up your heart and it means that someone can get inside you and mess you up. You build up all these defenses. You build up this whole armor, for years, so nothing can hurt you, then one stupid person, no different from any other stupid person, wanders into your stupid life… You give them a piece of you. They don’t ask for it. They do something dumb one day like kiss you, or smile at you, and then your life isn’t your own anymore. Love takes hostages. It gets inside you. It eats you out and leaves you crying in the darkness, so a simple phrase like “maybe we should just be friends” or “how very perceptive” turns into a glass splinter working its way into your heart. It hurts. Not just in the imagination. Not just in the mind. It’s a soul-hurt, a body-hurt, a real gets-inside-you-and-rips-you-apart pain. Nothing should be able to do that. Especially not love. I hate love.
Me? Well, so far I’ve been lucky. Never even came close.