The Wilds aren't safe anymore.

I guess that’s just part of loving people: You have to give things up. Sometimes you even have to give them up.

Because?' I prompt 'Because I'm sorry, but I can't help it, and I really need to kiss you right now.

As soon as I look up, his eyes click onto my face. The breath whooshes out of my body and everything freezes for a second, as though I’m looking at him through my camera lens, zoomed in all the way, the world pausing for that tiny span of time between the opening and closing of the shutter.

I reach out and grab her wrist. It feels impossibly tiny in my hand, like this one time I found a baby bird near goose Point, and I picked it up and it died there, taking its final gasping fluttering breaths in my palm.

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.

It's a miracle I was able to get out of the house today. It's a miracle I'm even wearing pants, a double miracle I remembered to wear shoes.