She released her grievances like handfuls of birdseed: They are there, and they are gone.

She’s easy to like. I’ve never understood why that’s considered a compliment - that just anyone could like you.

Because isn’t that the point of every relationship: to be known by someone else, to be understood? He gets me. She gets me. Isn’t that the simple magic phrase?

I feel like I need to give people a note with the book that says, 'I'm OK, no worries!'

Friends see most of each other’s flaws. Spouses see every awful last bit.

What an indulgence it would be, to just blow off my head, all my mean spirits disappearing with a gun blast, like blowing a seedy dandelion apart.

It was that summer, too, that I began the cutting, and was almost as devoted to it as my newfound loveliness. I adored tending to myself, wiping a shallow red pool of my blood away with a damp washcloth to magically reveal, just above my naval: queasy. Applying alcohol with dabs of a cottonball, wispy shreds sticking to the bloody lines of: perky. I had a dirty streak my senior year, which I later rectified.