The thing is, that world doesn't exist. All growing up means is that your realize no one will come along to fix things. No one will come along to save you.

Then I heard someone laugh. I wished I didn't know whose laugh it was, but I knew Will's laugh just like I knew he had a small scar right above his left elbow. You couldn't be reluctantly lust-ridden for someone without noticing stuff about them.

All the things I've thought about love are true. It's beautiful and terrible and it doesn't make things perfect. It ends things, and it brings beginnings. This is mine.

I love the me I am with him. I’m the girl who has Dave. I’m Lauren, Dave’s girlfriend. I’m someone better than Lauren Smith, who no one noticed till Dave came along. The thing is, that girl isn’t me and I know it. But when I’m with him, I feel like I could be her. That if something in me was just–I don’t know, shifted a little or something, smoothed down–people would think of me the way they think of Dave, and everything would always be perfect. I would be perfect.

I want to care, but I don’t. I look at you and all I feel is tired.

It could be enough, maybe, or at least a start, but the problem is that at night I tumble into dreams that aren't dreams at all. I tumble into memories and wake up aching for a dying world and a quiet, cold life that offered me nothing but sitting in a still room.

But I know a lie when I hear one.