I always tried to imagine what it would be like to open your door to find something you had given up on. Maybe it had seen places you never had, been rerouted and passed through so many strange hands, but still somehow found its way back to you, all before the day even began.

You can't make any one person your world. The trick is to take what each can give you and build a world from it.

I looked down again at the sign in my hand - ENJOY THE RIDE! - and it seemed, suddenly, to be just that. A sign.

You're not the kind of person who smiles for nothing, Colie. I have to earn every one.

I wondered if it was really because he cared about me, or if now I was just another challenge.

The lizard stared up at us, and we stared back, taking each other in. He was little and defenseless, I felt sorry for him already. This was a screwed-up place he'd just come into. But he didn't have to know that. Not yet, anyway. There in that room, where it was hot and cramped, the world probably still seemed small enough to manage.

I'd been through so much, falling short again and again, and only recently had found a place where who I was, right now, was enough.