Poetry isn't like any writing I've ever heard before. I don't understand all of it, just bits of images, sentences that appear half-finished, all fluttering together like brightly colored ribbons in the wind.

The thing is, you don't get to know. It's not like you wake up with a bad feeling in your stomach. You don't see shadows where there shouldn't be any. You don't remember to tell your parents you love them or--in my case--remember to say good-bye to them at all.

They didn’t get me, I should have said. They saved me.

I’m with Julian,” I say at last. This, after all, is what I have chosen.

it occurs to me that there is so much I never knew about him--his past, his role in the resistance, what his life was like in the Wilds, before he came to Portland, and I feel a flash of grief so intense it almost makes me cry out: not for what I lost, but for the chances I missed.

I need to live my life in the light of their deaths. I need to live.

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.