He is my soul mate, my fresh air, the reason I look forward to getting up every morning.

She can't just be a face, a body; there has to be more than that, some kind of connection. And I can't connect, don't want to connect, with anyone.

Lochie. The boy I once loved. The boy I still love. The boy I will continue to love, even when my part in this world is over too.

At the age of five she has already come to terms with one of the life's harshest lessons: that the world isn't fair.

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.

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.

At what point does a fly give up trying to escape through a closed window – do its survival instincts keep it going until it is physically capable of no more, or does it eventually learn after one crash too many that there is no way out? At what point do you decide that enough is enough?