i feel like a curtain has dropped away and i'm seeing people for who they really are, different, and sharp, and unknowable.

That is the rule of the Wilds: You must be bigger and stronger and tougher. You must hurt or be hurt.

I need to live my life in the light of their deaths. I need to live.

I guess that’s just part of loving people: You have to give things up. Sometimes you even have to give them up.

No guest rooms.” I shake my head resolutely. “I want to be in a room room. A lived-in room.

The house, the pond, the tree-it was all both overwhelmingly familiar and different from what she remembered-smaller and shabbier, somehow. It was like waking up to find that your reflection in the mirror had aged overnight, or had sprouted a new mole: You were forced to admit that things changed, whether you gave them permission to or not.

Somewhere in the endless spinning of eternity that one, tiny, fraction of a second where our lips met is lost forever.