Nina Lacour Quotes

The sun stopped shining for me is all. The whole story is: I am sad. I am sad all the time and the sadness is so heavy that I can't get away from it. Not ever.

I don't want to hurt you or anybody so please forget about me. Just try. Find yourself a better friend.

My room is so quiet and empty it hurts.

There are so many things that I want so badly to tell you but I just can't.

You might be looking for reasons but there are no reasons.

There used to be days that I thought I was okay, or at least that I was going to be. We'd be hanging out somewhere and everything would just fit right and I would think 'it will be okay if it can just be like this forever' but of course nothing can ever stay just how it is forever.

And I want to tell you about everything but I can't because I couldn't stand for you to have that look on your face all the time. I just need you to look at me and think that I'm normal. I just really need that from you.

I was okay just a moment ago. I will learn how to be okay again.

It was the moment I realized what music can do to people, how it can make you hurt and feel so good all at once.

We were nostalgic for a time that wasn't yet over.

dear today, i spend all of you pretending i'm okay when i'm not, pretending i'm happy when i'm not, pretending about everything to everyone.

This is what I want so don't be sad.

I wish you more happiness than can fit in a person.

I am a girl ready to explode into nothing.

...I think that people who make judgements about other people they don't even know are shallow, and people who start rumors are shallow, and I really don't care what shallow people say about me.

How does your life move forward, when all you want to do is hold still.

The trouble with denial is that when the truth comes, you aren't ready.

Each time a breeze starts, I feel the air all the way through me.

My best friend is dead, and I could have saved her. It’s so wrong so completely and painfully wrong, that I walked through my front door tonight smiling.

Sometimes inspiration strikes; other times you have to hunt it down.

How it's so easy for her to not feel anything at all, to be just completely gone, to not be around to see how fucked up she's made me. She got to disappear completely and I feel like I'm about to combust.

I’ll make a swing so I can reach the places I can’t reach yet.

I thought that it was more likely the opposite. I must have shut grief out. Found it in books. Cried over fiction instead of the truth. The truth was unconfined, unadorned. There was no poetic language to it, no yellow butterflies, no epic floods. There wasn't a town trapped underwater or generations of men with the same name destined to make the same mistakes. The truth was vast enough to drown in.

What I mean is don't be a person who seeks out grief. There is enough of that in life.

It’s a dark place, not knowing. It’s difficult to surrender to. But I guess it’s where we live most of the time. I guess it’s where we all live, so maybe it doesn’t have to be so lonely. Maybe I can settle into it, cozy up to it, make a home inside uncertainty.

That's what friends do: they notice things. They're there for each other. They see what parents don't.

He wipes tears off my face and then snot. He uses his hands. He loves me that much.

And I think of how time passes so differently for different people.

I could say the night felt magical, but that would be embellishment. That would be romanticization. What it actually felt like was life.

I was so blinded by her talent that I didn't recognize the tremendous pain behind her work. She gave me hundreds of images, so many chances to see that she was in trouble. I failed her.

Because in the conversation beneath this one, what we're really saying is I am an imperfect person. Here are my failures. Do you want me anyway?

I was such a quiet kid, so shy and calm and in my own head. Of course I knew about being sad. Maybe that's the reason I saved all the things I thought were pretty.

I wonder if there's a secret current that connects people who have lost something. Not in the way that everyone loses something, but in the way that undoes your life, undoes your self, so that when you look at your face it isn't yours anymore.

We love films because they makes us feel something. They speak to our desires, which are never small. They allow us to escape and to dream and to gaze into the eyes that are impossibly beautiful and huge. They fill us with longing. But also. They tell us to remember; they remind us of life. Remember, they say, how much it hurts to have your heart broken.

I hate that word. Straight. At the very least, those of us who are nonstraight should get called curvy. Or scenic. Actually, I like that: 'Do you think she's straight?' 'Oh no. She's scenic

The best things aren't perfectly constructed. They aren't illusions. they aren't larger than life. They are life.

We were miraculous. We were beach creatures. We had treasures in our pockets and each other on our skin.

I sleep through the next day. Each time I go to the bathroom, I try not to look in the mirror. Once, I catch my reflection: it looks like I’ve been punched in both eyes. I can’t talk about the day that follows that.

If only I had something to take the edge off the loneliness. If only lonely were a more accurate word. It should sound much less pretty.

Maybe there is no right thing to say. Maybe the right thing is just a myth, not really out there at all.

She peels an orange, separates it in perfect halves, and gives one of them to me. If I could wear it like a friendship bracelet, I would. Instead I swallow it section by section and tell myself it means even more this way. To chew and to swallow in silence here with her. To taste the same thing in the same moment.

The sun stopped shining for me is all.

I don't know if I still love her in the way I used to, but I still find her just as beautiful.

We felt so small with the city lights stretching forever below us, and we yelled at the top of our lungs because we were just these small humans but we felt more longing than could ever fit inside us.

There is an indescribable feeling that comes from being desperately in love with a song.

It isn't the happy ending Ingrid and I had dreamed up, but it's all a part of what I'm working through. The way life changes. The way people and things disappear. Then appear, unexpectedly, and hold you close.

Crushes are supposed to be fun, aren't they? They definitely aren't supposed to be so torturous.

I learn that I am a tiny piece of a miraculous world.

I imagine what would happen if everyone turned their regrets into wishes, went around shouting them.

Music is a powerful way for people to express themselves

I wish her more happiness than can fit in a person. I wish her the kind of happiness that spills over.

I don't want to hurt you or anybody s just please forget about e. Just try. Find yourself a better friend.I never laughed as hard as I laughed with you but now not even the laughing feels good.

When you love someone, you are sure. You don’t need time to decide. You don’t say stop and start over and over, like you’re playing some kind of sport. You know the immensity of what you have and you protect it.

I know that I am always alone, even when surrounded by people, so I let the emptiness in.

But sometimes two people have a deep connection. It makes romance seem trivial. It isn’t about anything carnal. It’s about souls. About the deepest part of who you are as a person.

I wonder if we will become okay again. I hope for it.

This was me before I knew about anything hard, when my whole life was packed lunches and art projects and spelling quizzes.

Searching, always. And yes, we all are, or soon will be, disenchanted, I still want to know it all: the heartbreak, the fear, the friendship, the anger, the love. All of it.

I listened to the same heartbroken song the entire bus ride home, because it was still a summer when sadness was beautiful.

I sort through the letters and pull out what I need for the beginning. They snap easily into place. And even though I thought I would need every letter, I finish the first sentence and realize that it’s all I have left to say. I MISS YOU.

Maybe we always were the people we imagined ourselves to be.

I used to cry over a story and then close the book, and it all would be over. Now everything resonates, sticks like a splinter, festers.

I could keep going forever, listing all my flaws in order from the most innocuous to the least. I am afraid of spiders... I fall in love too easily... I have fierce spells of self-doubt.

Here's how I feel: People take one another for granted. Like, I'd just hang out with Ingrid in all these random places--in her room or at school or just on a sidewalk somewhere. And the whole time we'd tell eachother things, just say our thoughts outloud. Maybe that would have been boring to some people, but it was never boring to us. I never realized what a big deal that was. How amazing it is to find someone who wants to hear about all the things that go on in your head. You just think that things will stay the way they are. You never look up, in a moment that feels like every other moment of your life, and think, "Soon this will be over." But I understand more now. About how life works.

She leans over our table and turns the sign in the window so that it says CLOSED on the outside. But on our side, perfectly positioned between Mabel’s place and mine, it says OPEN. If this were a short story, it would mean something.

What's the use in waiting until the right moment if that moment never comes?" I say. "What if the moment escapes you in a split second when your focus was elsewhere?

If things happen for a reason, I was meant to get fucked over.

my life is just waiting for you to get started.

I leaned over the sink, closer to my reflection, and stare at myself hard. I don't know what I see. I don't even know what I want to see.

They weren't cheap and I was almost broke. It was a choice between dinner and flowers and I chose flowers because it was a dark time in my life and my room was hideous and my heart was broken and I needed something beautiful.

When the bell rings, and lunch is over, I decide to come back here tomorrow, and the next day. I tell myself it really isn’t that bad.

How does your life move forward when all you want to do is. . . hold still.

There are many ways of being alone. That’s something I know to be true. I breathe in (stars and sky). I breathe out (snow and trees). There

Dignity is overrated. You know what trumps dignity? Kissing.

She was never something waiting to be solved. All she is - all she's ever been - is a person trying to live a life.

... even if I couldn't get into the dark places in her head, I would at least be there waiting on the outside.

I'll be better, so I won't want it to hurt anymore.

We all want to be feel something, we want to be someone to one another.

whatever I decide, I might be making a mistake. But if I'm going to make a mistake I want it to be passionate

He is Romeo, and he is heartbroken. Every word is wistful. When he says, 'O, teach me how I should forget to think!' I, for the first time, see what the big deal is about Shakespeare.

I never realized what a big deal that was. How amazing it is to find someone who wants to hear about all the things that go on in your head. You just think that things will stay the way they are. You never look up, in a moment that feels like every other moment in your life, and think, "Soon this will be over". But I understand more now. About the way life works.

There’s still this thing that happens after you break up with someone. It barely takes any time to work. All you have to do is continue with your life, and then when you find yourself in a room with her again it’s as if you’re a different person. Maybe your posture is a little more confident. Maybe your laughter is louder. You’re wearing perfume she’s never smelled before and you have a new way of pinning back your hair. You don’t even have to say anything because your presence alone is enough to say Look at who I am without you.

I know," I say. "It sucks. Let's go get tacos and sit on the beach.

Her suicide shook me deeply. It changed so much about how I view myself, the work I do with all of you.

There are degrees of obsession, of awareness, of grief, of insanity.

In just a little while we will forget all the things we used to want and adjust to the lives that we're given.

It's incredible," she says, "how much damage everyone does to everybody else.

How amazing it is to find someone who wants to hear about all the things that go on in your head.

I kept wondering then — I'm still wondering now — if there was a time when she realizes that something was going wrong. Inside her, I mean. when she could feel herself slipping away, something new creeping in. If she could have stopped it, or if it just... happened.

Tragedy," she says. "Heartbreak." She stops and then she makes sure that I'm looking at her. "Betrayal." Her eyes bore into mine... "These are all things that change a person. If we endure them and we aren't changed, then something is wrong.

It's a dark place, not knowing. It's difficult to surrender to. But I guess it's where we live most of the time. I guess it's where we all live, so maybe it doesn't have to be so lonely. Maybe I can settle into it, cozy up to it, make a home inside uncertainty.

There are no scenes in life, there are only minutes.

We are different people now, yes, but those girls were magic.

It sucks to lose your best friend, even if only to distance. Even when it isn't really losing her at all.

The ocean is far below us, but the waves crash so loudly, sound close enough to drown us.

No," I say. "I didn't know that," and as I say it I feel flooded with bitterness at all the things Ingrid kept secret from me.

They say that's what happens when you fall in love. You want to tell people things. You especially want to tell them sad things. Hidden sad things from the past. Something like: I was abandoned at a sweetshop in an unspecified European country.

She'd been a flower. Snipped from the root, quick to wilt, temporary. She'd existed to be lovely and to be chosen. No one had expected her to last.

I just want all my friends to be happy. And sometimes you have to do that one friend at a time.

There's nothing stupid about wanting to be loved. Believe me.

I wish I knew why she never told me any of this. Maybe she thought I wouldn't be able to handle it, that I was too sheltered or too innocent or something. If she had told me why she cut herself all the time, or that it was the pills that made her act so spaced out, or that she was even on pills, or even saw doctors, or any of it, I would have done my best to help her. I'm not saying I'm a superhero. I'm not saying I would have just swooped down and saved her. I'm just saying the only reason everything was a waste was that she made it a waste. That whole time, back when I was just a normal kid in high school, living out my normal life, I really thought everything mattered.

I can't think of enough expletives to perfectly capture this moment.

You go through life thinking there's so much you need...Until you leave with only your phone, your wallet, and a picture of your mother.

When you're friends with someone for such a long, it's easy to feel like she belongs to you, like the version of the person you became friends with is the only version.

We love films because they make us feel something. They speak to our desires, which are never small. They allow us to escape and to dream and to gaze into eyes that are impossibly beautiful and huge. They fill us with longing. But also. They tell us to remember; they remind us of life. Remember, they say, how much it hurts to have your heart broken. Remember about death and suffering and the complexities of living. Remember what it is like to love someone. Remember how it is to be loved. Remember what you feel in this moment. Remember this. Remember this.

I always knew what I wanted to do, I just didn't know I could do it.

We have photographed the trip we were supposed to have. The one where all any of us felt was happy, and the world was only beautiful, and all of the colors were the brightest versions of themselves.

I'm learning that it's good to think about what scares you. To bring it into the light. Even to hold it in your hands, if you can, and feel how it can't hurt you anymore. To think of it and say, 'I am not afraid.

I have only just learned how to be here. Life is paper-thin and fragile. Any sudden change could rip it wide-open. The

Empathy is wonderful, but you can still overdose on it if you try too much to fast.

As much as I had wanted a love story out of a movie, I know now that movies can only hope to to capture this kind of love.

This is how it works. You bust your ass. Not everything goes your way, and then, after a while, you get to that point. You get to make your own decisions and people look to you for approval on their work.

Then, without really realizing it, I start to think of one thing I did wrong for each tree I look at. Wide oak - I didn't tell anyone when Ingrid cut herself. Baby oak - the time I told her I was getting sick of hearing about Jayson's arms and his blue shirt. Tall tree with bare branches - the way I would leave when she got depressed and stopped talking. I should have stayed. I should have just sat quietly , so she knew I was with her.

Maybe it doesn't matter, maybe if we all force ourselves to act like we're okay even if we're not, eventually things will get better.

That girl she was trying to reach- she must have been running from something. She must have been someone special, for her friend to keep trying so hard. Too bad she was gone now.

She won’t ask if I’m okay because she’ll already know that for us Are you okay? is an impossible question.

YOu just think that things will stay the way they are. You never look up, in a moment that feels like every other moment of your life, and think, "Soon this will be over".

People take one another for granted

There are still Ava Maddoxes to find and sets to create and girls to kiss and colleges to attend. It's possible that someday I will hear a patsy Cline song and the heartbreak will barely register. It will be some distant, buried feeling. I won't remember how much it once hurt.

I lost nearly everything, and then I built something better.

It was terrifying, the idea that we could fall asleep girls, minty breathed and nightgowned, and wake to find ourselves wolves. “I

Life is paper-thin and fragile. Any sudden change could rip it wide open.

There's something fairy-tale-like about it, which is perfect, because fairy tales are all about innocence and ill will and the inevitability of terrible things. They're all about the moment when a girl is no longer who she once was

And then she is kissing me, right here on the sidewalk on a foggy summer night. Violet is kissing me, and everything is perfect. The kiss doesn't end. We are not two girls on a polite first date, bestowing a customary good-night peck. No. We are kissing like girls who have ached for each other for years who never even spoke but somehow exchanged I love yous anyway.

It isn't the happy ending that Ingrid and I have dreamed up, but it's all a part of what I'm working through. The way life changes. The way people and things disappear. Then appear, unexpectedly, and had you close

Maybe the fear doesn’t ever actually go away. Maybe we have to keep on working. We thought it would be simple, but it isn’t. We thought we could be finished, but maybe . . . maybe we’ll never be entirely finished.

We are all humans; we all wake up messy and confused.

I've been waiting for this for so long--something new, life after high school.

I can't believe that we could be so impermanent

I think that sometimes people want something so much that they manifest it. Or at least they try to.

You're never going to be ready"..."Don't you see that? You have to forget about ready. If you don't, you're always going to run away

Nobody's crazy here. We just see different things.

Don't you want to kiss me?' she asks. She smiles just a little, a hopeful, sweet smile, but buried in it is that confidence that slays me.

The first time she carved something into her skin, she used the sharp tip of an X-Acto knife. She lifted up her shirt to show me after the cuts had scabbed over. She had scrawled F*** YOU on her stomach. I stood quiet for a moment, feeling the breath get knocked out of me. I should have grabbed her arm and taken her straight to the nurse's office, into that small room with two cots covered in paper sheets and the sweet, stale medicinal smell. I should have lifted Ingrid's shirt to show the cuts. Look, I would've said to the nurse at her little desk, eyeglasses perched on her pointed nose. Help her. Instead, I reached my hand out and traced the words. The cuts were shallow, so the scabs only stood out a little bit. They were rough and brown. I knew that a lot of girls at our school cut themselves. They wore their long sleeves pulled down past their wrists and made slits for their thumbs so that the scars on their arms wouldn't show. I wanted to ask Ingrid if it hurt to do that to herself, but I felt stupid, like I must have been missing something, so what I said was, F*** you too, b****. Ingrid giggled, and I tried to ignore the feeling that something good between us was changing.

My mom says Ingrid's name and I start to hum, not the melody to a song, just one drawn-out note. I know it makes me seem crazy, I know it won't make anything change, but it's better than crying, it's better than screaming, it's better than listening to what they're telling me.

No one will know if you stay in bed all day. No one will know if you wear the same sweatpants for the entire month, if you eat every meal in front of television shows and use T-shirts as napkins. Go ahead and listen to that same song on repeat until its sound turns to nothing and you sleep the winter away. I

Ingrid's skin was the smoothest texture, so pale that it was transparent. I could see the blue veins that ran down her arms, and they made her seem fragile somehow. the way Eric Daniels, my first boyfriend, seemed fragile when I laid my head on his chest and heart his heart beating and thought, Oh. People don't always remember about the blood and the heartbeat. But whenever I looked at Ingrid, I was reminded of the things that kept her alive.

It was a summer of trying not to think too deeply.

So this was how it felt- to be dealt a blow, to pause, to keep going in spite of it. Not to start over but to continue.

Friendship is about more than facts. It's about knowing what someone is thinking, or knowing enough to know that you don't. But I guess it's also about not letting too much time go by without asking them questions, so you don't end up looking at them one afternoon, the sun so bright you have to squint, realizing that you hardly recognize the person they've become.

There's still this thing that happens after you break up with someone. It barely takes anytime to work. All you have to do is continue with your life, and then when you find yourself in a room with her again it's as if you're a different person.

You get close to people. You get farther from them. You learn how much you love them, and then you say good-bye, believing that you will be together again, someday, when your lives curve back into one another's.

It's the opposite of the collapse of the fantasy. It's what happens when the illusion pales in comparison to the truth. I'm seeing her for the first time. Not Ava Garden Wilder, the rags-to-riches granddaughter of Clyde Jones. Not a tragic, romantic heroine. Just Ava. And I am utterly in love.

You've never told him", Violet says. It's not a question. It's obvious. "I tell him all the time - I just make sure it's never when he's listening. I say it when he's in the other room, or when he's asleep, or when the music's really loud. Sometimes he asks me what I just said. And I tell him never mind. Or I make up something else, something that isn't 'I love you'.

Is it possible to get over a voice like this? Someday, I'd like to be able to hear her speak a sentence on the phone with out it making me want to hang up, get in my car, and drive as many miles as it takes to kiss her.

I was afraid of how we lived without opening doors.

the heart is a treacherous beast

I'm sorry I left without telling you," she says. "I wasn't ready. I wanted it so much, and I wasn't ready for that.

There’s something about distance, being removed from what’s familiar, that lets things happen.

I want to tell you all the sad things, and then you will know me better than other people know me and that means we are reserved for one another.

I was afraid of my loneliness. And how I'd been tricked. And the way I'd convinced myself of so much: that I wasn't sad, that I wasn't alone.

I don't know if any of this would have happened if we had been at home... Would we have crammed ourselves into the bathroom of a San Francisco restaurant to play her song? I doubt it. There's something about distance, being removed from what's familiar, that let's things happen.

What is was, was that we complemented each other. We just fit in this way that made strangers ask us if we were sisters, even though her hair was blond and curly and mine was straight and dark. Even though her eyes were blue and mine were brown. Maybe it was the way we acted, or spoke, just moved. The way we would look at something and both have the same thought at the same moment, and turn to each other at the same time and start to say the same thing.

I wonder what would happen if I stopped walking, if I let the crowd fill up the space between us. Would he notice? Would he wade back to find me? Or would he keep going, because forward is his destination and I am not?

You go through life thinking there's so much you need. Your favorite jeans and sweater. The jacket with the faux-fur lining to keep you warm. Your phone and your music and your favorite books. Mascara. Irish breakfast tea and cappuccinos from Trouble Coffee. You need your yearbooks, every stiffly posed school-dance photo, the notes your friends slipped into your locker. You need the camera you got for your sixteenth birthday and the flowers you dried. You need your notebooks full of the things you learned and don't want to forget. You need your bedspread, white with black diamonds. You need your pillow - it fits the way you sleep. You need magazines promising self-improvement. You need your running shoes and your sandals and your boots. Your grade report from the semester you got straight As. Your prom dress, your shiny earrings, your pendants on delicate chains. You need your underwear, your light-colored bras and your black ones. The dream catcher hanging above your bed. The dozens and dozens of shells in glass jars... You think you need all of it. Until you leave with only your phone, your wallet, and a picture of your mother.

I can't muster a smile. Even with the knowledge that it's dark outside and light up here, it's hard to believe that he can see us. We should be invisible. We are so alone. Mabel and I are standing side by side, but we can't even see each other. In the distance are the lights of town. People must be finishing their workdays, picking up their kids, figuring out dinner. They're talking to one another in easy voices about things of great significance and things that don't mean much. The distance between us and all of that living feels insurmountable.

A maioria das vidas é longa, e a maioria das dores é curta. Os corações não se partem de verdade, eles sempre continuam batendo

I'm glad we didn't know better.

There are no scenes in life, there are only minutes. And none are skipped over and they all lead to the next.

I am not a darling. I am a girl ready to explode into nothing

Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can.

If our past selves got a glimpse of us now, what would they make of us?

And we step off the curb, all of us together, as if to say: Here we come. Through hard days and good ones, through despair and through exhilaration, in love and out of love, for just now or for forever. Here we come. It's our parade.

Here it is, all at once: rightness. Not the graffiti itself, even though it's undeniably spectacular, but this feeling of making plans and carrying them them through, of meeting people and getting to know them, of being asked to do something and saying Yes, of wanting something, asking for it, making it happen.

I do not mean the difficulty. I do not mean the sex. I mean there are too many failings. Not enough hope. Everything is despair. Everything is suffering. What I mean is don't be a person who seeks out grief. There is enough of that in life.

No one talked about the way the summer was supposed to unfold or the places we'd find ourselves in the fall.

I could say the night felt magical, but that would be embellishment. That would be romanticization. What it actually felt like was life.

A terrible day," Frank echoes. "Yes," Edie says, her gaze never leaving Ava's face. "But look. You grew up anyway.

There are many ways of being alone.

Something in me is cracking open, the light coming through is so bright it hurts, and the rest of me is still here, wounded, even though I know it's all for the best.

It's a dark place, not knowing.

Dylan, in her skintight black jeans, safety-pinned shirt, and bulky armbands, with her hair sticking out in every direction and that black freshly smeared around her eyes, doesn't just smile, doesn't just walk toward Maddy and put her arms around her. No. Instead, every muscle in her whole body seems to lose all tension, her step forward resembles a skip, and she lets out a hey that might as well say, I love you, you are so beautiful, no one in the world is as amazing as you are.

There will be a night, some night, I am sure of it, when the mystery of all of this won’t be so difficult anymore. None of us will ever understand all of it, but you will not be in the dark.

Then, without really realizing it, I start to think of one thing I did wrong for each tree I look at. Wide oak- I didn't tell anyone when Ingrid cut herself. Baby oak- the time I told her I was getting sick of hearing about Jayson's arms and his blue shirt... Then I look out to where there's this huge group of trees in the distance, and I count those for all the times I called her some name, or told her she was being stupid- because even though I was always joking, it might have hurt.

A leap. Look how precious you were. A spin. How worthy of love you were. A dip. Look at your heart, intact. Reach to the sky. What a miracle it was. Swoop to the grass. How steadily it beat for the people you loved.

It's about what I know is true. Because I'm looking at this bright red storm of color on a canvas, at all my delicate lines and passionate brushstrokes. I'm looking at something so urgent and true, so far beyond what I thought I was capable of making.

What’s the use in waiting until the right moment if that moment never comes?” I say. “What if the moment escapes you in the split second when your focus was elsewhere?

I hope you don't get in trouble," I said, but how could trouble find us? We were miraculous. We were beach creatures. We had treasures in our pockets and each other on our skin.

But what I didn’t know yet was that you can tell a girl you want to hang out with her because she said something smart.

The trouble with denial is that when the truth comes, you aren’t ready.

Maybe we always were the people we imagined ourselves to be. Able and brave. Maybe we still are.

And Emilie opened the door.

Here was the taste of it — a little bitter, a little sweet, some citrus brightness, maybe honey. And here was meaning. A home, hers alone.

I remember thinking that I looked like the kind of person I would want to know if I just happened to meet myself.

I took the chain between the tips of my fingers, lifted it to the light. Each delicate link sparkled in the sun. It would have been lovely on anyone's wrist. It would have been precious, with or without me. But it was everything I wanted, because I chose it to be mine.

From the top of Castro Street, it looks like a river of people. It looks, I realize, like a march - rows and rows of people, gathered to exert their power. Only this time we aren't marching. We don't need to show our numbers to show our worth. This time our power comes from staying in this space, from walking the hallowed ground of our history and bringing it to life. I am alone, yes. But I am a part of everything. I feel it - I've been living in a world, but what I have is a universe.

Yearning is a red-haired girl sitting on the hood of her silver sedan, reading about Marilyn Monroe. A cherry orchard at night, houselights in the distance. It's the painstaking neatness of a paint-by-number sunset, a yellowed letter held between graceful fingers, a cautious step into the sun-filled lobby of a famous hotel. It's the way I feel every time I think about Ava.

I need to leave something behind. Something that will stay. This room should be a historical landmark, the site of the beginning and end of Colby and Bev. Several minutes have passed, and I know that if I wait too long there will be a knock on the door and I'll have to go, but I need to leave a mark. It has to be significant enough to last, but subtle enough that the maid won't notice and wash it away. As I'm looking around I realize that I never noticed the print above the bed. It's another in the family series - a faded wedding portrait. Groom in tux. Bride with pearls. It comes off the wall easily.I set the print on the bedspread and wit eht dust on the wall with the sleeve of my hood. I take out a Sharpie from my bag. The wall has yellowed to create a perfect rectangle where the photograph must have been hanging, unremoved, for years. I fill the whiter space with this: I never got to tell you how beautiful you are. And then I return the frame to its place on the wall and go back out into the night.

I became aware, then, of the way I moved through the world. No unusual scars or crooked bones. Nothing about the way I looked at first glance that gave me away. I wondered who had done that to him. Who had left it untreated.

I’m just afraid that one day something’s going to catch me by surprise. Stale coffee. Squares of American cheese. Hard tomatoes, so unripe they’re white in the center. The most innocent things can call back the most terrible.

Would you really fight for him?" I nod. But the nod isn't enough, so I go on. "In fact, I would tear through rubble with my bare hands to get to him. I would lift cars. I would wrestle down anyone who said we shouldn't be together. I would stare down life and kick it in the ass if I had to. Because if you want to know the truth -- if you really want to know the truth -- none of that could be nearly as hard as being in love with him and not being able to tell anyone about it. Including him. I have this thing inside me, and it's angry and it's scared and it's uncertain and most of all it's so completely in love with him, and it would do anything to keep him, even if it means things staying the way they are now.

The words make sense, but deeper than the words is the truth. She's right. If Mabel's talking about the girl who hugged her good-bye before she left for Los Angeles, who laced fingers with her at the last bonfire of the summer and accepted shells from almost-strangers, who analyzed novels for fun and lives with her grandfather in a pink, rent-controlled house in the Sunset that often smelled like cake and was often filled with elderly, gambling men—if she's talking about that girl, then yes, I dissapeared.

I want to confess. I thought that her story was comprised of scenes. I thought the tragedy could be glamorous and her grief could be undone by a sunnier future. I thought we could pinpoint dramatic events on a time line and call it a life. But I was wrong.

As much as people want to look on the bright side, skip straight to the future when everything will be okay, the truth is that there is this time, where you sometimes have trouble breathing, and you feel powerless. Like you’re screaming and no one hears you, and the myth of the happy future is nothing you can count on, and the only word that makes sense is escape.

Whenever Ingrid and I got out of the suburbs, into Berkeley or San Francisco, and saw how other people lived, Ingrid would cry at the smallest of things- a little boy walking home by himself, a discarded cardboard sign saying HUNGRY PLEASE HELP. She would snap a picture, and by the time she lowered her camera, tears would already be falling. I always felt kind of guilty that I didn't feel as sad as she did, but now, watching Dylan, I think that's probably a good thing. I mean, you see a million terrible things every day, on the news and in the paper, and in real life. I'm not saying that it's stupid to feel sad, just that it would be impossible to let everything get to you and still get some sleep at night.

We were innocent enough to think that our lives were what we thought they were, that if we pieced all of the facts about ourselves together they'd form an image that made sense—that looked like us when we looked in the mirror, that looked like our living rooms and our kitchens and the people who raised us—instead of revealing all the things we didn't know.

When you live in LA and work in the movies, you experience the collapse of some of that fantasy. You know that the eyes glow like that because of lights placed at a specific angle, and you see the actresses up close and, yes, they are beautiful, but they are human size and imperfect like the rest of us.

It's an ache. A heavy sadness. The kind that is brought on by heartbreak and then perpetuated by everything that reminds you of the way it's broken. The kind that feels impossible to shrug off or tuck away. But there is another feeling, too, surfacing, and soon I discover that it's the kind that makes the heartbreak almost something to savor because it is so simple and true.

And I think of how time passes so differently for different people. Mabel and Jacob, their months in Los Angeles, months full of doing and seeing and going. Road trips, the ocean. So much living crammed into every day. And then me in my room. Watering my plant. Making ramen. Cleaning my yellow bowls night after night after night. “It’s

How it all started was in the first day of English, when Brother John had us analyze some stupid poem, and you raised your hand and said something so smart about it that suddenly the poem didn’t seem stupid anymore. And I knew that you were the kind of person I wanted to know. But what I didn’t know yet was that you can tell a girl you want to hang out with her because she said something smart. So I looked for an excuse to talk to you, and I found one.” She’s never told me this before. “It wasn’t about a manicure,” she says. She shakes her head as though the idea were absurd, even though it’s the only version of the story I’ve known until now.