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

It won't matter if nobody ever thinks I'm pretty (although sometimes I wish, just for a second, that somebody would)

There are no happy endings, only breaks in the regular action.

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

How is it possible, I think, to change so much and not be able to change anything at all?

Two weeks until your cure" she says finally. "Sixteen days" I say, but in my head I'm counting: Seven days. Seven days until I'm free and away from all these people and their sliding superficial lives brushing past one another gliding, gliding, gliding from life to death. For them there's hardly a change between the two.

Grief is like sinking, like being buried. I am in water the tawny color of kicked-up dirt. Every breath is full of choking. There is nothing to hold on to, no sides, no way to claw myself up. There is nothing to do but let go. Let go. Feel the weight all around you, feel the squeezing of your lungs, the slow, low pressure. Let yourself go deeper. There is nothing but bottom. There is nothing but the taste of metal, and the echoes of old things, and days that look like darkness.