Writing is very cathartic for me. As a teacher, I hear many students say that writing can be painful and exhausting. It can be, but ultimately I believe that if you push through, the process is healing and exhilarating.

Maybe he was real. Maybe I'd made him up. Either way, he didn't think I needed him anymore. Maybe he was right.

She had changed him. The ice was in his eyes and in his heart, like he had predicted with that song, but now they were deep embedded there, all the pain of the world. Not pain to make you feel for somebody else but pain to make you stop feeling.

L.A. kills people.' Jacaranda said. 'You're lucky you're leaving. You'll be able to write.' She looked paler, going through another depression, smoking in bed in her lilac room. The walls were the color of her veins. She was getting too thin, even for the modeling. . .Jacaranda died last winter when the flowering trees were bare. You couldn't even tell which ones once cried the purple blossoms she named herself after.

Under the pink Harlequin sunglasses strawberry dangling charms, and sugar-frosted eyeshadow she was really almost beautiful.

It was always a relief when she came home to him. Like water or food. Like music or that moment when you cut yourself with a knife and squeeze the skin and no blood oozes out.

I wish I wasn’t a girl who needed so much but a little free creature that slept in deserts and ran on clouds and lived on lilies.