I hate both of my parents right now: for sitting quietly in our house, while out in the darkness my heart was beating away all of the seconds of my life, ticking them off one by one until my time was up; for letting the thread between us stretch so far and so thin that the moment it was severed for good they didn't even feel it.

I don't love you, Lena. Do you hear me? I never love you.

I'm not ugly but I'm not pretty either. Everything is in-between. I have eyes that aren't green or brown, but a muddle. I'm not thin but I'm not fat either. the only thing you could definitely say about me is that: I'm short

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 wonder if this is how people always get close: They heal each other's wounds; they repair the broken skin.

Through wind, and tempest, storm, and rain; The calm shall be buried inside of me; A warm stone, heavy and dry; The root, the source, a weapon against pain

Suicide. A sideways word, a word that people whisper and mutter and cough: a word that must be squeezed out behind cupped palms or murmured behind closed doors. It was only in dreams that I heard the word shouted, screamed.