Annabel

I love you. Remember. And someday, I will find you again.

But from the beginning, I knew that in a world where destiny was dead, I was destined, forever, to love him. Even though he didn't - though he couldn't - ever love me back.

That's the easy thing about falling: there is only one choice after that.

Is it possible to tell the truth in a society of lies? Or must you always, of necessity, become a liar?

That's what time does: We stand stubbornly like rocks while it flows all around us, believing that we are immutable - and all the time we're being carved, and shaped, and whittled away.

That’s what made it so frightening to the lawmakers: Love obeys no laws other than its own.

But that's the problem with love - it acts on you, works through you, resists your attempts to control.

A small part of me was glad. There's always relief in giving up.

And in that moment, the wordless thing passed between us, the thing that wasn't quite love but was so close I could believe in it sometimes.

Amazing how hope lives. Without air or water, with hardly anything at all to nurture it.

This was what being cured was like: like being in a fishbowl, circling always inside the same glass.

If Conrad remembered the skinny, frightened girl he'd held for one brief moment on a frigid Boston street corner, he showed no signs of it when we met ... Even as I tried to urge hum back against the pillows, he looked at me with wild eyes. "What happened to your leather jacket?" he asked. "Shh," I said, trying to sooth him. "There's no leather jacket." "You were wearing it the first time I saw you," he said, frowning slightly.

Time is really just a test of patience.

Love grew inside me like a delicious secret.

And if you lie to a liar, is the sin somehow negated or reversed?

The dagger pin is all I have left. It is comfort and pain, both, because it reminds me of all I’ve had, held, and had taken from me. It is my pen, too. With it, I write my story, again and again, in the walls. So I don’t forget. So it becomes real. I think of: Conrad’s hands, Rachel’s dark hair, Lena’s rosebud mouth, how when she was an infant, I used to sneak into her bedroom and hold her while she slept. Rachel never let me—from birth, she screamed, kicked, would have woken the household and the street. But Lena lay still and warm in my arms, submerged in some secret dreamland. And she was my secret: those nighttime hours, that twin heartbeat space, the darkness, the joy.

I wonder what Lena is doing now. I always wonder what Lena is doing. Rachel, too: both my girls, my beautiful, big-eyed girls. But I worry about Rachel less. Rachel was always harder than Lena, somehow. More defiant, more stubborn, less feeling . Even as a girl, she frightened me—fierce and fiery-eyed, with a temper like my father’s once was. But Lena . . . little darling Lena, with her tangle of dark hair and her flushed, chubby cheeks. She used to rescue spiders from the pavement to keep them from getting squashed; quiet, thoughtful Lena, with the sweetest lisp to break your heart. To break my heart: my wild, uncured, erratic, incomprehensible heart. I wonder whether her front teeth still overlap; whether she still confuses the words pretzel and pencil occasionally; whether the wispy brown hair grew straight and long, or began to curl. I wonder whether she believes the lies they told her.

Scratching my way through minutes that feel like years, and years that have run by me like sand, like waste. But

Love obeys no laws other than its own. That's what always made it frightening.

See?” my mother would say, smiling at me and my sister, Carol, in turn. “We live in the greatest country on earth. See how lucky we are?” And yet the ash continued swirling down, and the smells of death came through the windows, crept under the door, hung in our carpets and curtains, and screamed of her lie. Is it possible to tell the truth in a society of lies? Or must you always, of necessity, become a liar? And if you lie to a liar, is the sin somehow negated or reversed? These are the kinds of questions I ask myself now: in these dark, watery hours, when night and day are interchangeable. No. Not true.

Amazing, how hope lives. Without air or water, with hardly anything at all to nurture it.

Pero Lena... Mi queridita Lena, con su maraña de pelo negro y sus sonrosadas, rechonchas mejillas. Ella solía rescatar arañas del pavimento para evitar que las aplastaran; callada, pensativa Lena, con el más dulce ceceo para romper tu corazón. Para romper mi corazón: mi salvaje, no curado, errático, incomprensible corazón.