His door is closed behind me. It's staying closed. He's letting me go. I think I've made myself very clear, but no ones stepping forward to stop me. A lot of you cared, just not enough. And that...that is what i needed to find out. And I did find out. And I'm sorry.

And what if in the future we're at war again, or we still haven't elected a non-white or non-male president, or the Rolling Stones are still dragging their tired old butts on stage? That would depress me way too much.

Maybe it didn’t seem like a big deal to you Zach. But now, I hope you understand. My world was collapsing. I needed those notes. I needed any hope those notes might have offered. And you? You took that hope away. You decided I didn’t deserve to have it.

That’s when I said it. That’s when I whispered to her, “I’m so sorry.” Because inside, I felt so happy and sad at the same time. Sad that it took me so long to get there. But happy that we got there together.

It was love because it was worth it.

My heart and my trust were in the process of collapsing. And that collapse created a vacuum in my chest.

The young adult literature is relatively new - it just kind of exploded in the 2000s. When I grew up, there weren't bookstores with sections dedicated to teen lit, nor was my generation raised reading books written specifically for us. Because of that, today we still think of books for teens as children's books and so when you write a book that includes sensitive topics, it just seems even more controversial. What's troubling to me about that is these are issues adults know that teens deal with. Not writing about them makes them something we don't, or can't talk about.