Sometimes maybe you should let someone you love travel great distances away from you. You shouldn’t think you needed to set out to retrieve them and put them back where they belonged. Sometimes they were only safe and happy, like Annabelle Aurora. And then other times, it was just possible they were lost at sea. It would be your duty, then, to get out into the boat and search, even if the waves were choppy and the wind was howling the protests of the dead.

The most true-love words are not the ones that grasp and hold and bind you, twisting you both up together in some black dance. No, they are ones that leave you free to stand alone on your own solid ground, leave him to do the same, a tender space between you.

Most of our parents wanted the best for us, I knew, but we also wanted the best for them.

The favorite game of temperamental people is Try to Guess Why I’m Ticked Off. (Contestant number one, Why do YOU think he’s pissed off? Why, I’m not sure, Bob, but I’m going to go with ‘Because I Left the Faucet Dripping.’ BEEP. I’m sorry, that’s incorrect. The correct answer is: ‘Because You Happen to Exist.’)

Love was also an easy word, used carelessly. Felons and creeps could offer it coated in sugar, and users could dangle it so enticingly that you wouldn't notice that it had things attached - heavy things, things like pity and need, that were weighty as anchors and iron beams and just as impossible to get out from underneath.

It's shocking the things we call love.

Stereotypes are fast and easy, but they are lies, and the truth takes its time.