❝You can feel people staring; it’s like heat that rises from the pavement during summer, like a poker in the small of your back. You don’t have to hear a whisper, either, to know that it’s about you. I used to stand in front of the mirror in the bathroom to see what they were staring at. I wanted to know what made their heads turn. What it was about me that was so incredibly different. At first I couldn’t tell. I mean, I was just me. Then one day, when I looked in the mirror, I understood. I looked into my own eyes and I hated myself, maybe as much as all of them did. That was the day I started to believe they might be right. ❞

❝When you don’t fit in, you become superhuman. You can feel everyone else’s eyes on you, stuck like Velcro. You can hear a whisper about you from a mile away. You can disappear, even when it looks like you’re still standing right there. You can scream, and nobody hears a sound. You become a mutant who fell into the vat of acid, the Joker who can’t remove his mask, the bionic man who’s missing all his limbs and none of his heart. You are the thing that used to be normal, but that was so long ago, you can’t even remember what it was like.❞

❝….but one day you’re going to wake up and see that this whole time you’ve been gone, you’ve only been headed back to where you started. And I’ll be there, waiting.” He leans forward and kisses me once, feather-light, on the lips. “It’s not like I’m not letting you go,” he murmurs. “I’m just trusting you enough to come back.❞

❝Relationships always sounded so physically painful: you fell in love, you broke a heart, you lost your head. Was it any wonder that people came through the experience with battle scars?❞

❝There are two kinds of love. In the safe kind, you look for someone who’s exactly like you. It’s what most folks settle for. But then there’s the other kind of love. Everyone’s born with a ragged edge, and some folks crave for that piece that’s a perfect fit. You’ll search for it forever if you have to. And if you’re lucky enough to find it, and because it looks so right, you start to tear at your own seams, thinking, maybe I could look just as perfect. But then, of course, when you try to get close to the other half, you don’t fit anymore. That kind of love.. you come out of it a different person than you were when you started.❞