When I’m running, there’s always this split second when the pain is ripping through me and I can hardly breathe and all I see is color and blur—and in that split second, right as the pain crests, and becomes too much, and there’s a whiteness going through me, I see something to my left, a flicker of color […]—and I know then, too, that if I only turn my head he’ll be there, laughing, watching me, and holding out his arms. I don’t ever turn my head to look, of course. But one day I will. One day I will, and he’ll be back, and everything will be okay. And until then: I run.

Unhappiness is bondage; therefore, happiness is freedom. The way to find happiness is through the cure. Therefore, it is only through the cure that one finds freedom.

I've been so used to thinking of what the borders are keeping out that I haven't considered that they're also penning us in.

...into hate, into refusal, against hope and without fear

It is war now, and armies need symbols.

It's an incredible thing, how you can feel so taken care of by someone and yet feel, also, like you would die or do anything just for the chance to protect him back.

But maybe happiness isn't in the choosing. Maybe it's in the fiction, in the pretending: that wherever we have ended up is where we intended to be all along.