“Everyone has that moment I think, the moment when something so momentous happens that it rips your very being into small pieces. And then you have to stop. For a long time, you gather your pieces. And it takes such a very long time, not to fit them back together, but to assemble them in a new way, not necessarily a better way. More, a way you can live with until you know for certain that this piece should go there, and that one there.”
“That's how hearts get broken, you know. When you believe in promises.”
“I remember the stars that night. They were like salt against the sky, like someone spilled the shaker against very dark cloth. That mattered to me, their accidental beauty.”
“+"I think u are having a different sort of heartbreak. Maybe a kind of heartbreak of being in the world when u don’t know how to be.”
“I'm tired and angry at me. For letting myself get smaller and smaller in the hopes that he would notice me more. But how can someone notice you if you keep getting smaller?”
“She's not a cookie, or a book, or a record on a shelf. You can't just play with her and then put her back.”
“You can't break my heart, she cries, breathy and furious. You can't own my soul. What I have, I made, what I have is mine. What I have I made, what I have is mine.”
“People should know about us. Girls who write their pain on their bodies. ~Louisa”
“I just want to feel better. My own body is my deepest enemy. It wants, it wants, it wants and when it does not get, it cries and cries and I punish it. How can you live in fear of your own body?”
“Don't let the cereal eat you. It's only a fucking box of cereal, but it will eat you alive if you let it.”
“...when I look at my arms, I don't think revolutionary. I think sad, and pain, but not revolutionary.”
“Everything and everybody that's busted can be fixed. That's what I think.”
“Each aberration of my skin is a song. Press your mouth against me. You will hear so much singing.”
“Girl listens to radio. Girl finds music. Girl has whole other world.
Girl slips on headphones. World gone.”
“Everyone has that moment, I think, the moment when something so...momentous happens that it rips your very being into small pieces. And then you have to stop. For a long time, you gather your pieces. And it takes such a very long time, not to fit them back together, but to assemble them in a new way, not necessarily a better way. More, a way you can live with until you know for certain that this piece should go there, and that one there.”
“People aren't nice, people aren't nice, you should know that by now.”
“I'm no stranger to fucking up.”
“Dear Ellis, I have something really fucking angelic to tell you.”
“Go be absolutely, positively, fucking angelic.”
“I don't feel sad. For just now, I don't feel scared. I feel, for right now, well, kind of triumphant.”
“Everyone here seems to know exactly what they need, but I leave without a thing.”
“I think you are having a different sort of heartbreak. Maybe a kind of heartbreak of being in the world when you don't know how to be. If that makes any sense?”
“Keep your shit together and stay strong, he whispers in my ear.”
“Mickey holds up the soggy paper. DIE. Don't you die.”
“That's what was in my head in the attic when I took broken glass from my tender kit and began to cut myself into tiny pieces.”
“I blink at myself. I could be a girl, a real girl. I could be a possibility, with Mikey. Couldn't I?”
“I room with Louisa. Louisa is older and her hair is like a red-and-gold noisy ocean down her back. There's so much of it, she can't even keep it in with braids or buns or scrunchies. Her hair smells like strawberries; she smells better than any girl I've ever known. I could breathe her in forever.
My first night here, when she lifted her blouse to change for bed, in the moment before that crazy hair fell over her body like a protective cape, I saw them, all of them, and I sucked my breath in hard.
She said, "Don't be scared, little one."
I wasn't scared. I'd just never seen a girl with skin like mine.”
“I'm so unwhole. I don't know where all the pieces of me are, how to fit them together, how to make them stick. Or if I even can.”
“After he died, my mother was like a crab: she tucked everything inside and left only her shell.”
“People will love you or hate you for being different, but who’s to say which way it’ll go? You never know. It’s completely arbitrary.”
“God is silent. The devil whispers…”
“Back in bed I listen to every sound. The plastic tarp over the table on the balcony crunching in the cold wind. the two short clicks in the walls before the heat comes on with a low whoosh. I hear a constant base hum all around, the nervous system of the building, carrying electricity and gas and phone conversations to all our respective little boxes. I listen to it all, the constant, the rhythmic, and the random. It's hard to measure the night by sound, but it can be done. I know that when the traffic noise is quietest, it's about 4:30 in the morning. I know that when the 'Times' hits the door, it's around 5. Now the clock says it's morning, 5:45, but the November sky still says midnight. I hear the elevator ding twenty yards down the hall outside our door. Seven seconds later, I hear his keys in our lock, then his heavy backpack hitting the floor. I hear the refrigerator door open, the unsealing vacuum wheezing as the cold inside air meets the dry heat in the apartment. The cupboard door. A glass. The crescendoing fizz of a new two-liter Diet Coke bottle opening. It's a one-sided conversation with no one actually talking. I lie in the dark, close my eyes, and try not to listen to his movements around apartment. these are the sounds of our life together before it got so messy. I want to say something back. Anything, anything that sounds like things sounded last summer. Even just to myself. Just something out loud.
The inside of my eyelids turn pink. My door has been opened and the light from the hallway shines through them. I won't open them. There is no noise.
Like an eclipse, the world behind my closed eyes goes dark again. For just one second, before I feel a kiss on my right eye. I keep them closed. A kiss on the left one. I open them. Jack looks down at me and closes his eyes. He leans forward and puts his forehead on my chest and goes limp.
''Blues Clues' is on,' he says softly into my tee shirt. His muffled voice vibrating only a half inch away from my heart.”
“Such is the end of the evil-doer: the death of a sinner always reflects his life.”
“I think I’ll leave it off, just for you. You can think about us naked. Hammering. Nailing. Pounding. Screwing.” He gives me a totally naughty and completely adorable smirk. “I will be thinking no such things.” “Oh, yeah, you will. It will be all you think about for the rest of the day.”
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