Yes, we could talk to you for days on end about all the bad first dates. Those are stories. Funny stories. Awkward stories. Stories we love to share, because by sharing them, we get something out of the hour or two we wasted on the wrong person. But that's all bad first dates are: short stories. Good first dates are more than short stories. They are first chapters. On a good first date, everything is springtime. And when a good first date becomes a relationship, the springtime lingers. Even after it's over, there can be springtime.

Dullness is the spice of life. Which is why we must always use other spices.

I find faith in human perseverance, even as the universe throws challenge after challenge our way.

I am so used to hints and mixed messages, saying things that might mean what they sort of sound like they mean. Games and contests, roles and rituals, talking in twelve languages at once so the true words won't be so obvious. I am not used to a plainspoken, honest truth.

Even though I'm seventeen, I guess I still thought this would always be true - that there would always be that lost-and-found, and not the lost-and-still-lost that I am now trapped inside.

By the time I got there, you’d already decided. And I quickly decided to let you decide. You were already seeing the rooms as ours, and that was enough for me.

She transforms once again into someone carefree, and I transform into someone whose only care is her.