And then I screwed up and the Colonel screwed up and Takumi screwed up and she slipped through our fingers.

Girls think they’re only allowed to wear dresses on formal occasions, but I like a woman who says, you know, I’m going over to see a boy who is having a nervous breakdown, a boy whose connection to the sense of sight itself is tenuous, and gosh dang it, I am going to wear a dress for him.

And I don’t blame him. I don’t even trust me.

And yet still I worried. I like being a person. I wanted to keep at it. Worry is yet another side effect of dying.

But ultimately I do not believe that she was only matter. The rest of her must be recycled, too. I believe now that we are greater than the sum of our parts. If you take Alaska's genetic code and you add her life experiences and the relationships she had with people, and then you take the size and shape of her body, you do not get her. There is something else entirely. There is a part of her greater than the sum of her knowable parts. And that part has to go somewhere, because it cannot be destroyed

She loved mysteries so much that she became one.

Books—they weren't ladders out of the abyss, but they were companions.