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.

Over the past week, I’ve accepted that I will never love Julian as much as I loved Alex. But now that idea is overwhelming, like a wall between us. I will never love Julian like I love Alex.

There are some losses we never get over.

My heart shoots into my throat every time I think I see his loping walk, or catch sight of some floppy brown hair on a boy - but it's never him, and each time it isn't, my heart does a reverse trajectory down into the very pit of my stomach.

But...books are so much more. Some of them are webs; you can feel your way along their threads, but just barely, into strange and dark corners. Some of them are balloons bobbing up through the sky: totally self-contained, and unreachable, but beautiful to watch. And some of them―the best ones―are doors.

It's funny how you can know your friends so well, but you still end up playing the same games with them.

We are such small, stupid things. For most of my life I thought of nature as the stupid thing: Blind, animal, destructive. We, the humans, were clean and smart and in control: we had wrestled the rest of the world into submission, battered it down, pinned it to a glass slide and the pages of The Bool of Shhh.