La puerta del bosque

The sound of him sleeping was almost as good as having someone to reach out for in the dark.

I pride myself on not needing friends -I thought it meant I didn't need anybody.

Nothing could be worth feeling this way. I feel like a changeling wearing someone else's skin. I can't remember what I liked, or what I wanted, why I worked or left the house or did anything. It's all gone [...] I think whatever I used to be, it dropped through the binding. I wish the rest of me had gone with it.

My mind was an old cassette tape that kept being recorded over. Only wavering ghost notes from the old music came through. I wondered, sometimes, what the original recording would sound like. -What the source code of me might look like. I worried it was darker than I wanted it to be. I worried it didn't exist at all.

Everyone is supposed to be a combination of nature and nurture, their true selves shaped by years of friends and fights and parents and dreams and things you did too young and things you overheard that you shouldn't have and secrets you kept or couldn't and regrets and victories and quiet prides, all the packed-together detritus that becomes what you call your life.

I remembered less from my own life than I did from the books I read.

Books want to be read, and by the right people. There's nothing surprising in it, not to me.

Beneath the beauty and the charm and the sharp sparkle of her personality, she had a core of steel.

...And it was perfect. There are no lessons in it. There's just this harsh, horrible world touched with beautiful magic, where shitty things happen. And they don't happen for a reason, or in threes, or in a way that looks like justice. They're set in a place that has no rules and doesn't want any.

I knew the sound of someone trying to hold back tears in the dark, and I knew I was making them.