The Last of August

I tended to spend too much time with my favorite things, loved them too hard until I wore them down. After a while, they became more like a shorthand for who I was and less like things I actually enjoyed.

She looked like a whisper made real.

Maybe this is what happened when you built a friendship on a foundation of mutual disaster. It collapsed the second things righted themselves, left you desperate for the next earthquake.

Friendship I understood. There had to be an arc there, some kind of story that the two of you were telling just by being together. Something made up from what you wanted from the world and what you got instead. A story you reminded each other of when you needed to feel understood.

You know, I told Dad not to tell you about that whole near-death thing. I said that you'd overreact, and I was right." There was a long pause, and then the shouting got somewhat louder.

I’m a teenage girl. He is my boy best friend. We would be everything to each other until we couldn’t.

There’s not a lot you can control, you know. Where you’re born. Who your family is. What people want from you, and what you are, underneath it all. When you have so little say in it all, I think it’s important to exercise a measure of control when given the opportunity.” She smiled, ducking her head. “So I blow things up.

Do you know what love is? I’ll tell you: it is whatever you can still betray.” THE LOOKING GLASS WAR, JOHN LE CARRÉ

There needs to be a German compound word for feeling both guilty and enraged. - Jamie

Charlotte. There's a girl on the roof. She says her name is Lena... She says she brought the helicopter you wanted? - August

She smiled at me, that one particular smile I hardly ever saw, the one that could open padlocks, Yale locks, bank vaults, the one that was a trapdoor down into everything.

It’s strange to grieve for your former self, and still I think it’s something that any girl understands. I’ve shed so many skins, I hardly know what I am now—muscle, maybe, or just memory. Perhaps just the will to keep going.

But these—they weren’t case updates so much as letters, the kind you wrote to someone you knew so well you could imagine them beside you, even when they were across an ocean, living out another life.