What else could he possibly have done? What choices did he ever have?

He will think Lochan wasn't loved, but he was, more deeply than most people are in a lifetime.

I would give anything to escape myself, Flynn thought, just for a day, just for a minute even. Just to know what it was like to think differently, to feel differently, and to not be me.

If I keep breathing, then I have to keep living, and if I keep living, then I have to keep hurting, and I can't - not like this.

I am overcome by a feeling of complete detachment. I am a mere object to these people. I am barely human any more.

But whichever form it took it brought with it, in those moments of bitter anguish, such a desperate surge of hope that it was almost untouchable, and flitted away like a golden butterfly into the bright blue sky - beautiful, unreachable and completely transistent.

I don't know when it started - this thing - bit it's growing, muffling me, suffocating me like poison ivy. I grew into it. It grew into me. We blurred at the edges, became an amorphous, seeping, crawling thing.