Amy Reed

“I don't know if anyone can ever really explain why they believe in someone. But I do. I believe in you. I hope that's worth something.”

“What if I can't ever be who you want me to be? What if I keep letting you down?”

“All I know is I want you to be happy, and if I could do anything to give that to you, I would.”

“I'd love to wrap myself inside your sadness and pretend it is mine”

“You act like you're invincible, but I know deep down you want someone to hold your hand and buy you flowers and look you in the eye and tell you you're his soul mate. You want someone who will love every piece of you, even the pieces you can't love yourself.”

“I said just let me try one more time and she said, "THAT'S ENOUGH, ISABEL," again, and she could just say it over and over and it would never get through my thick skull because I'm always wanting and wanting because nothing is ever enough you are never enough I am never enough I am never enough I AM NEVER ENOUGH.”

“Shirley: "Christopher, would you like to tell Olivia what "F.I.N.E" means?"Christopher: "Fucked-up, Insecure, Neurotic, and Emotional"...Olivia: "But what if you really do feel fine?"Shirley: "Christopher, care to answer that?"Christopher: "Um, there's no such feeling as fine.”

“I'm empty and lonely and lost and I'm starving, and there isn't enough in the whole wide world that could make me feel whole.”

“There is a whole other world with an entirely different version of me, a me that is not pretty, a me that no boys want, a me she would never talk to.”

“Teen angst is so boring, isn't it? I try so hard not to be a cliche, but it's like written in my DNA to hate my parents and be totally unsatisfied with everything. I wonder if there's anyone our age who actually likes their life.”

“That's what dreams are really like, you know? They're not full of melting clocks or floating roses or people made out of rocks. Most of the time, dreams look just like the normal world. It's your feelings that tell you something's off. Not your mind, not your intellect, not something as obvious as that. The only part of you that really knows what's going on is the part of you that's most a mystery. If that's not Surrealism, I don't know what is.”

“Sometimes I think you don't really believe the things you say; you just like the sound of yourself having opinions.”

“Maybe there's a galaxy with a planet that's just a little more tilted, with a sun that shines just a little bit darker, and that's where I'm supposed to be, where it somehow makes sense to feel this broken.”

“I feel like I'm a snow globe and someone shook me up and now every little piece of me is falling back randomly and nothing is ending up where it used to be.”

“What if I'm so broken I can never do something as basic as feed myself? Do you realize how twisted that is? It amazes me sometimes that humans still exist. We're just animals, after all. And how can an animal get so removed from nature that it loses the instinct to keep itself alive?”

“This is the kind of thing that makes sense to them; this is a language they know. They know what to do with`disease'. They know how to attach a doctor's medical descriptions to hope.”

“Imagine trying to live without air.Now imagine something worse.”

“Smoke is not chasing me and making my eyes sweat. My eyes are not burning. I am not crying. I am not standing behind my mother and she is not facing the wall and she is not saying, 'Smoke follows beauty.' Smoke follows beauty. Smoke follows beauty. Smoke follows beauty.”

“There is a picture of me in their heads, a picture of someone I don't know yet. She is not the chubby girl with the braces and bad perm. She is not the girl hiding in the bathroom at recess. She is someone new, a blank slate they have named beautiful. That is what I am now: beautiful, with this new body and face and hair and clothes. Beautiful, with this erasing of history.”

“Do you remember? Do you remember the world before the poison?”

“Nothing made me the way I am. Nothing but me.”

“I wonder if anybody else feels this way, if anyone in here is as scared as I am. Are they as sad and angry and confused and ashamed? Is that even possible? Is it even possible for one building to hold all that pain?”

“Before there was Cocaine or vodka or sex or any of that, there was fantasy. There was escape. That was my first addiction. I remember being a little kid and imagining everything different, myself different. How did I get the idea in my head at age eight that everything was better somewhere else? Why would a child have a hole inside that can't get full no matter what she does? The real world could never make me happy, so I retreated to the world inside my head. And as I grew, as the real world proved itself more and more painful, the fantasy world expanded.”

“Imagine everything feeling wrong. Imagine a hole in your chest the size of God.”

“Do you remember? Do you remember being solid? Do you remember life before the hole? Before you were empty and needed to be filled? There was a time when everything was enough. There was a time you didn't try to get out of your own skin. Remember?”

“Smoke follows beauty.”

“What if talking about your feelings doesn't fix anything? What if what you really need is to make the feelings go away?”

“Even though I'm sleeping again, everything still feels a little rickety, like I'm here but not quite here, like I'm just a stand-in for my real self, like someone could just reach over and pinch me and I'd deflate. I thought I was feeling better, but I don't know anymore.”

“People don't just let you change identities, not unless there's something in it for them.”

“And what they're doing could be called kissing but it's more like sword fighting with tongues.”

“He backs out the door batting those eyelashes I thought were so sexy when I first met him. Now I want to pluck them out one by one.”

“Maybe this is all love is and all it will ever be-- boys fucking girls and pretending it's love, girls getting fucked and pretending they like it, saying "I love you, too," and wanting to throw up.”

“I want to crush my cigarette on his eyelid. I would rather he keep fucking me for the rest of the night than lie here staring at me tracing my ribs with his fingertips, acting like what happened meant something.”

“I feel the ghost of his fingers inside me.”

“I feel myself floating without the weight of him on my body.”

“It feels like the ground is breathing and the air has hands, like everything is moving except me, like I am the only thing solid, like it is the rest of the world that is dizzy.”

“They are ghosts of people I never knew, which the rain will wash away.”

“And my name sounds like flowers in his mouth.”

“If you are still, no one can hurt you. If you play dead, there is nothing to kill.”

“And that's when it hits me, the punch in the stomach, the carving out of my insides. That's when I realize that none of this is a movie. I will not go out with a bang. There is no ending. There are no credits. I will wake up and I will keep waking up and this will always be waiting for me.”