Mia and I had been together for more than two years, and yes, it was a high school romance, but it was still the kind of romance where I thought we were trying to find a way to make it forever, the kind that, had we met five years later and had she not been some cello prodigy and had I not been in a band on the rise - or had our lives not been ripped apart by all this -I was pretty sure it would've been.

And if I'm not forgiven, then at least I'm understood.

I know that all the magic kisses in the world probably couldn't have helped him today. But I would do anything to have been able to give him one.

There were signs. Probably more of them than I ever caught, even after the fact. But I missed them all. Maybe because I wasn’t looking for them. I was too busy checking over my shoulder at the fire I’d just come through to pay much attention to the thousand-foot cliff looming in front of me.

A day might just be twenty-four hours but sometimes getting through one seems as impossible as scaling Everest.

Life is a big fat gigantic stinking mess, that's the beauty of it, too.

It's quiet now. So quiet that can almost hear other people's dreams.