When you love someone, when you care for someone, you have to do it through the good and the bad. Not just when you're happy and it's easy.

All this time, I thought we were growing apart because I was leaving Lena behind. But really it was the reverse. She was learning to lie. She was learning to love.

Please understand. Please forgive me. I prayed every day for you to be alive, until hope became painful. Don't hate me. I still love you.

He Is looking at me through the smoke, across the fence. He never takes his eyes off me. His hair Is a crown of leaves, of thorns, of flames. His eyes are blazing with light, more light than all the lights in every city in the whole world, more light than we could ever invent If we had ten thousand billion years.

My stomach gets that hollowed-out feeling. It's amazing how words can do that, just shred your insides apart.

This is what amazes me: that people are new every day. That they are never the same. You must always invent them, and they must always invent themselves, too.

I cry for everything I abandoned and because I, too, have been left behind -- by Alex, by my mom, by time that has cut through our worlds and separated us.