“Cindy was the last girl to arrive at the house. As with all the other girls, there was no car that dropped her off, no sound of the front door opening, no footsteps on the stairs. One day, they just looked up and there she was, standing nervous in the doorway.”

“The most surprising thing was not that you were there, but how young you looked. You were exactly the same as the last time I saw you, all those years ago. Exactly the same as the day we met for the very last time at our usual spot, in the backwoods by the old road. You’d brought a couple of coca-colas and for a while we sat at the edge of the pond, leaning against each other and sipping them in that warm late-summer silence.”

“To miss you again is to be nothing. It’s to drift through my days as a ghost. I walk through this old city and stare up at buildings that remind of you, and of a time when I truly felt at home. I see a familiar rooftop in the distance and flash back to the moment I dangled my legs off of it and laid my head to rest on your shoulder. “

“I have a vision of us, maybe months or years from now, lying in a shared bed in my lamp-lit room, our legs tangled underneath the covers. It’s quiet and dark, and I’m sitting up. You’re sleepy, your breathing slow and steady, and your arm is tossed gently across my lap.”

“You sit alone in your room, bundled in covers, sipping water in the dark, and you decide to light a candle. You think about a boy, who is probably thinking about other boys, and you wonder about first kisses and last kisses and everything that happens in between.”

“I told a story once. It was dark and stormy and full of strange confessions whispered into an open ear. All the world was a stage for me, and I told a story full of hope and love and heartbreak and betrayal and all the things we try to piece together to make ourselves whole.”

“I think getting to know myself through your eyes has allowed me to expand more than I’d known before - like I can take deeper breaths and feel the air fill every part of me and know that I am here; a solid thing that can hold itself together and contain a gust of wind without floating away.”

“Timmy’s always been one to follow all the rules – he’s never had any imagination. To him, things have always been done a certain way, and should always be done that way, forever and ever and ever. Sometimes it annoys her, but today it doesn’t.”

“She was hesitant to tell me about the things she was so used to whispering to herself in the dark. I felt like we could be a couple of giggling schoolgirls again, back on the playground, cupping our hands around each other’s ears and throwing conspiratorial glances at the rough boys kicking sand into each other’s eyes.”