My confidence was of the hothouse variety, carefully cultivated under highly regulated conditions. One wrong look, one mean comment, and my facade would wither.

Let the glossy spreads have their heart-stopping, head-turning kind of beauty. Give me the heart-filling beauty instead. Jolie laide, that's what I would choose. Flawed, we're truly interesting, truly memorable, and yes, truly beautiful.

I didn't know that the world could be so mind-blowingly beautiful.

Silence, too, can be torture.

If there was one thing I refused to be, it was an insignificant footnote in some boy's history.

Like world describers before me, those mapmakers in the seventeenth centure, I had laid down my first faintly drawn border. With that one tentative mark, my world expanded by a few freeing degrees.

He knew me in all the ways that truly mattered: the shape of my fears, the contours of my dreams.