Leave it to a man to mess things up

Those eyes, they've got a history with mine. They were the first things I saw when I came to, after being hit in the skull with a baseball thrown by Patrick at Little League. They were the fortification I needed at sixteen to ride the chairlift at Sugarloaf, although I am terrified of heights. For almost my whole life, they've told me I'm doing all right, during moments when it was not in my own power to answer.

I have never fit into this town, this marriage, this skin. I am the child who was picked last to play tag; I am the girl who laughed although she did not get the joke; I am the piecemeal part of you that you pretend doesn't exist, except it is all I am, all the time.

If you end your story, it's a static work of art, a finite circle. But if you don't, it belongs to anyone's imagination. It stays alive forever.

That's because you've never been one. You haven't spent years wearing someone else's clothes, taking someone else's name, living in someone else's houses, and working someone else's job to fit in. And if you don't sell out, then you run away... proving you're the Gypsy they said you were all along.

I think we deserve a happily-ever-after." "If anyone ever did, it's us.

Sometimes it made her want to put her fist through glass; other times, it made her cry a river.