Raven has lost deeply, again and again, and she, too, has buried herself. There are pieces of her scattered all over. Her heart is nestled next to a small set of bones buried beside a frozen river, which will emerge with the spring thaw, a skeleton ship rising out of the water”.

Everything looks beautiful. The Book of Shhh says that deliria alters your perception, disables your ability to reason clearly, impairs you from making sound judgments. But it does not tell you this: that love will turn the whole world into something greater than itself.

I start to back away before I do something wildly inappropriate, like jump on top of him.

It's as though the words are trapped, buried under past fears, past lives, like fossils compressed under layers of dirt.

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.

It's too late. I've seen things...I've lost things you can't understand.

How can someone have the power to shatter you to dust--and also to make you feel so whole?