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.

i could see the veins through your skin like a map to inside you. how could skin be that thin? i was so afraid you might drop and break. i stopped breathing so you wouldn't.

If Los Angeles is a woman reclining billboard model with collagen-puffed lips and silicone-inflated breasts, a woman in a magenta convertible with heart-shaped sunglasses and cotton candy hair; if Los Angeles is this woman, then the San Fernando Valley is her teenybopper sister. The teenybopper sister snaps bug stretchy pink bubbles over her tongue and checks her lipgloss in the rearview mirror, . . . Teeny plays the radio too loud and bites her nails, wondering if the glitter polish will poison her.

Maybe i would become a mermaid... i would live in the swirling blue-green currents, doing exotic underwater dances for the fish, kissed by sea anemones, caressed by seaweed shawls. I would have a doliphin friend. He would have merry eyes and thick flesh of a god. My fingernails would be tiny shells and my skin would be like jade with light shining through it I would never have to come back up

Nothing happened. And everything did. Your whole life you can be told something is wrong and so you believe it. Why should you question it? But then slowly seeds are planted inside of you, one by one, by a touch or a look or a day skateboarding in a park, and they start to burst out of old hulls shells and they start to sprout. And pretty soon there are so many of them. They are named Love and Trust and Kindness and Joy and Desire and Wonder and Spirit and Soulmate. They grow into a garden so dense and thick that it starts to invade your brain where the old things you were once told are dying.

Weetzie wished she could shake blue glitter around all of them - keeping them sparkling and safe.

Pianos, unlike people, sing when you give them your every growl. They know how to dive into the pit of your stomach and harmonize with your roars when you’ve split yourself open. And when they see you, guts shining, brain pulsing, heart right there exposed in a rhythm that beats need need, need need, need need, pianos do not run. And so she plays.