And this, really, is the story-within-the-story, because if you do not believe that hearts can bloom suddenly bigger, and that love can open like a flower out of even the hardest places, then I am afraid that for you the world will be long and brown and barren, and you will have trouble finding the light. But if you do believe, then you already know all about magic.

It strikes me how strange people are. You can see them every day - you can think you know them - and then you fшnd out you hardly know them at all.

I'm gone, lost, floating away into nothingness like I am in my dream, but this time it's a good feeling - like soaring, like being totally free, and I can feel the impression of his fingers everywhere that they touch, and I think of stars streaking through the sky and leaving burning trails behind them, and in that moment - however long it lasts, seconds, minutes, days - while he's saying my name into my mouth and I'm breathing into him, I realize this, right here, is the first and only time I've ever been kissed in my life.

It will kill me, it will kill me, it will kill me. And I don't care.

It's like a razor blade edging its way through my organs, shredding me, all I can think is: It will kill me, it will kill me, it will kill me. And I don't care.

She was mine before she was yours.

Everything in me feels fluttering and free, like I could take off from the ground at any second. Music, I think, he makes me feel like music.