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.

My heart is drumming in my chest so hard it aches, but it's the good kind of ache, like the feeling you get on the first real day of autumn, when the air is crisp and the leaves are all flaring at the edges and the wind smells just vaguely of smoke - like the end and the beginning of something all at once.

They say the cure is about happiness, but I understand now that it isn't, and it never was. It's about fear: fear of pain, fear of hurt, fear, fear, fear - a blind animal existence, bumping between walls, shuffling between ever-narrowing hallways, terrified and dull and stupid.

Black is too morbid; red will set them on edge; pink is too juvenile; orange is freakish

And for a moment―for a split second―everything else falls away, the whole pattern and order of my life, and a huge joy crests in my chest. I am no one, and I owe nothing to anybody, and my life is my own.

This is the strange way of the world, that people who simply want to love are instead forced to become warriors.

Everyone you trust, everyone you think you can count on, will eventually disappoint you.