Sometimes there were seconds, even minutes, in which the awful weight of Sarah's situation wouldn't cross her mind, but then the knowledge would come flooding back like a tsunami that overwhelmed all.

Sometimes Sean hoped karma was real, other times he prayed it wasn't.

Aaron had come to believe we were nothing more than clusters of the bad choices we'd made in our lives.

No one was better at ruining her life than herself.

The sadness only deepened over time.

The terror came not from without but from within.

He made a career out of making people uncomfortable.

Once Stan became sober he stopped having an excuse for his shitty behavior.

Normalcy had been abolished.

We waited expectantly for a modicum of adulation that never lasted beyond our birthdays.

Reality just wasn't good enough anymore.

The bluesman died, but the blues remained.

The end of the vacation was always hard to handle.

The future is fungible, we prayed.

Money was a tool and so was he.

The first day was his last.

She was a peace-loving hippie until she got behind the wheel.

There was no room left in the house to buy more things so they moved.

The xenophobe railed against the kind of people his grandparents had been when they arrived on these shores.

The city's haze matched the one in her brain that morning as she headed towards her highrise.

He liked to sit and watch people pass by at the airport and make up stories about their lives.

The sunset over LA was a bullet wound.

They danced to the oldies band like it was 1987 all over again.

She hoped she had somehow slipped into an alternate universe and would find a way back to her own where truth, science, and logic ruled.

The political landscape had become a theater of the absurd.

The light at the end of the tunnel turned out to be a firestorm.

We'd been entertained to death.

He wanted poetry but got vitriol instead.