I’m so scared that if I move even an inch, my body will snap in half and everyone will see that my insides are made up of nothing but all the tears I’m swallowing back right now.
I often felt like a very old person trapped in a young person’s body.
I could live here, I think. Live where gravity does not know my name. Here I am unbound, untethered by the chains of this life. I am a different body, a different shell, and my weight is carried by the hands of friends. So many nights I’ve wished I could fall asleep under this sheet.
She could see all of Ferenwood from here: the rolling hills, the endless explosion of color cascading down and across the lush landscape. Reds and blues: Maroon and ceruleans. Yellow and tangerine and violet and aquamarine. Every hue held a flavor, a heartbeat, a life. She took a deep breath and drew it all in.
How can you be ashamed of an attempt to be better?
I’m nineteen years old,” he clarifies. “I’m a fairly impressive specimen for my age, I know.
It’s like there are a million screams caught inside of my chest but I have to keep them all in because what’s the point of screaming if you’ll never be heard and no one will ever hear me in her. No one will ever hear me again.
If only my emotions would understand the importance of excellent timing.
I can’t be my own person if I constantly require someone else to hold me together.
I’ve never read anything like this before. I’ve never read anything that could speak directly to my bones.
It is only in the desperate seconds before death that we realize the windows against which we broke our bodies were only mirrors, all along.
I am not dramatic, okay? My presence just commands a certain kind of attention-.
We breathe when we’re wrong, we breathe when we’re right, we breathe even as we slip off the ledge toward an early grave. It cannot be undone. So I breathe.
I just read anything I could find. Fairy tales and mysteries and history and poetry. It didn’t matter what it was. I would read it over and over and over again. The books, they helped keep me from losing my mind all together.
The darkness is like a black canvas punctured by a blunt knife, with beams of light peeking through.
Castle’s easy grin dances into the room before he does.
The tension is so thick it’s practically its own person, taking up a seat we don’t have to spare.
It was so hard for Ocean to stomach that the world was filled with such awful people. I tried to tell him that the bigots and the racists had always been there, and he said he’d honestly never seen them like this, that he never thought they could be like this, and I said yes, I know. I said that’s how privilege works.
My parents loved us but I wasn’t always sure they liked us.
He has that kind of face. The kind of face that makes you forget where you are, who you are, what you might’ve been about to do or say. I’ve missed him so much. Missed his eyes.