that's what it was like waking up in the crypts. no-longer-dead. but without her. like burning alive.

You have to go forward: It's the only way. You have to go forward no matter what happens. This is the universal law.

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.

This was what being cured was like: like being in a fishbowl, circling always inside the same glass.

Something aches at the very core of me, something ancient and deep and stronger than words: the filament that joins each of us to the root of existence, that ancient thing unfurling and resisting and grappling, desperately, for a foothold, a way to stay here, breathe, keep going.

Now I'd rather be infected with love for the tiniest sliver of a second than live a hundred years smothered by a lie.

They told us love was a disease. They told us it would kill us in the end. For the very first time I realize, that this, too, might also be a lie.