The hope was, people like me got to finally find our place in college or in the actual world. People who understood this told you that high school wasn't the actual world, that it was more like a temporary alternate reality you were forced to believe in for four years. A video game you played, where you could never get to the next level no matter how hard you tried.

Sometimes you've got to make a mess before you clean it up.

An untold story has a weight that can submerge you, sure as a sunken ship at the bottom of the ocean.

Fate is a shape-shifter. It is the kindest and most generous entity imaginable, laying out more goodness than a person deserves, and then it shrinks and curls and forms into something grotesque. You think something is one thing, but then it´s another.

Yeah. When you want what's real and you try to find that in high school, you might as well be looking for a mossy rock beside a babbling brook on the corner of Sixth and Pine in downtown Seattle.

You were a stone wall, a fort in high, unreachable trees, an island, my own island, that no boat could reach.

Hope could be the most powerful thing or the most useless.