Paper Covers Rock

Read to your heart's content. Though if you are a reader, the heart is never content.

Reading, she tells me, is what she does best. She loves it because it uses the whole of her, the right and the left, the hemispheres of reason and imagination. She discovered as a child that a closed book is a darkness anyone can enter, not a cary darkness like a basement or a storm, but a comforting one that wrapped her up neatly inside a world she could control.

You have to stop and freeze the moment," he told me I had told her. "You have to make yourself remember by repeating it in your head over and over. You have to write to preserve your sanity.

It is hard to be true to yourself because it is hard to be yourself.

What I carry in my backpack down to the river, I carry not knowing that in less than an hour Thomas Broughton will be dead. That is not a knowledge I carry yet, but I will carry it soon - the knowledge of my darkest self - and I will carry it forever.

Read to your heart’s content. Though if you are a reader, the heart is never content.

She touches her wrist where her watch used to be, her fingers lost without time to hold on to.

Until it has scared you with its endlessness, sky is just sky.

You are on my side," she says. "What side is that?" I ask. "The winning side," she says, and smiles. "The team of the artists." "Who are we playing?" "The barbarians," she says. "We are always playing them.

a closed book is a darkness anyone can enter, not a cary darkness like a basement or a storm, but a comforting one that wrapped her up neatly inside a world she could control.

If I were good the way my dad is good, then I wouldn't be filling up these pages. They would be blank, the way they were when I came to Birch. Tabula Rasa. They would be clean, the way I used to be.

So many options that they're almost overwhelming. Which is why it is sometimes so easy to grab the cliche, to reach out to what is familiar. But don't. Because metaphor is all about comparison of two unfamiliar, unlike things.

What I carry, too, is the burden of proof that they were, in fact, right. That I am coming to know who I am.