His hands are holding my cheeks, and he pulls back just to look me in the eye and his chest is heaving and he says, "I think," he says, "my heart is going to explode," and I wish, more than ever, that I knew how to capture moments like these and revisit them forever. Because this. This is everything.

People seldom realize that they tell lies with their lips and truths with their eyes all the time.

I want your mind. Your strength. I want to be worth your time.

I love walking into a bookstore. It's like all my friends are sitting on shelves, waving their pages at me.

Hope. It's like a drop of honey, a field of tulips blooming in the springtime. It's a fresh rain, a whispered promise, a cloudless sky, the perfect punctuation mark at the end of a sentence. And it's the only thing in the world keeping me afloat.

And some days I wonder why I insist on keeping myself alive.

His lips soften into a smile that cracks apart my spine. He repeats my name like the word amuses him. Entertains him. Delights him. In seventeen years no one has said my name like that