Are you sure that being like everybody else will make you happy?" "I don't know any other way." "Let me show you." And then we're kissing. Or at least, I think we're kissing—I've only seen it done a couple of times, quick closed-mouth pecks at weddings or on formal occasions. But this isn't like anything I've ever seen, or imagined, or even dreamed: this is like music or dancing but better than both.

Finishing books - and leaving the world you've created - is always a kind of emotionally wrenching experience. I usually cry.

It's as though the words are trapped, buried under past fears, past lives, like fossils compressed under layers of dirt.

There's that confidence again, that semi-infuriating easiness of his, the tilt of his head and the smile. but today it's not infuriating. Today I like it, feel like it's somehow rubbing off on me, like if I was around him enough I would never feel awkward or frightened or insecure.

If singing were a feeling it would be this, this light, this lifting, like laughing.

And you can't love, not fully, unless you are loved in return.

My first kiss. A new kind of kiss, like the new kind of music still playing, softly, in the distance - wild and arrhythmic, desperate. Passionate.