It was a bird. A bird struggling through stickiness: a bird coated in paint, floundering in its nest, splashing color everywhere. Red. Red. Red. Dozens of them: black feathers coated thickly with crimson-colored paint, fluttering among the branches. Red means run.

Love: a single word, a wispy thing, a word no bigger or longer than an edge. That's what it is: an edge; a razor. It draws up through the center of your life, cutting everything in two. Before and after. The rest of the world falls away on either side.

Chance. Stupid, dumb, blind chance. Just a part of the strange mechanism of the world, with its fits and coughs and starts and random collisions.

i suppose that's the secret, if you're ever wishing for things to back the way they were. You just have to look up.

But it does not tell you this: that love will turn the whole world into something greater than itself.

Love is the only thing in the world worth having. You must never loose it or give it away. We must never let them take it from us.

Juliet!' I whip around but not quickly enough. She's swallowed by the crowd, the gap that allowed her to break for the door closing just as quickly as it opened, a shifting Tetris pattern of bodies.