Is this freedom? Is it happiness? I don't know. I don't care anymore. It is different--it is being alive.

Maybe before you die, it's your ghosts you see.

It will kill me, it will kill me, it will kill me. And I don't care.

Could it be? Samantha Kingston? Home? On a Friday?” I roll my eyes. “I don’t know. Did you do a lot of acid in the sixties? Could be a flashback.” “I was two years old in 1960. I came too late for the party.” He leans down and pecks me on the head. I pull away out of habit. “And I’m not even going to ask how you know about acid flashbacks.” “What’s an acid flashback?” Izzy crows. “Nothing,” my dad and I say at the same time, and he smiles at me.

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.

Everything I see and touch reminds me of him, and so everything I see and touch is perfect.

Over the past week, I’ve accepted that I will never love Julian as much as I loved Alex. But now that idea is overwhelming, like a wall between us. I will never love Julian like I love Alex.