For the first time in my life I've done something for me and by choice and not because somebody told me it was good or bad.

The first one, we’ll name Blue.

My former people were not totally wrong. Love is a kind of possession. It’s a poison. And if Alex no longer loves me, I can’t bear to think that he might love somebody else.

The walls are covered -crammed- with writing. No. Not writing. They are covered with a single four-letter word that has been inscribed over and over, on every available surface. Love.

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

Time becomes a stutter-the space between drumbeats, splintered into fragments, and also endlessly long, as long as soaring guitar notes that melt into one another, as full as the dark mass of bodies around me. I feel like the air downstairs has gone to liquid, to sweat and smell and sound, and I have broken apart in it. I am wave: I am pulled into the everything. I am energy and noise and a heartbeat going boom, boom, boom, echoing the drums.

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