“A memory, pressed into my heart like a leaf in a book.”

“Taylor wanted me to forget about Conrad, to just erase him from my mind and memory. She kept saying things like, “everybody has to get over a first love, it’s a rite of passage.” But Conrad wasn’t just my first love. He wasn’t some rite of passage. He was so much more than that. He and Jeremiah and Susannah were my family. In my memory, the three of them would always be entwined, forever linked. There couldn’t be one without the others. If I forgot Conrad, if I evicted him from my heart, pretended like he was never there, it would be like doing those tings to Susannah. And that, I couldn’t do.”

“Hearing him say it now, that is was my birthday present, touched me in the last place I wanted him to touch me. My heart.”

“I release you. I evict you from my heart. Because if I don't do it now, I never will.”

“There are moments in life that you wish with all your heart you could take back. Like, just erase from existence. Like, if you could, you'd erase yourself right out of existence too, just to make that moment not exist.”

“But just because you bury something, that doesn’t mean it stops existing. Those feelings, they’d been there all along. All that time. I had to face it. He was part of my DNA. I had brown hair and I had freckles and I would always have Conrad in my heart.”

“My heart was pounding a million trillion times a minute. I never felt more alive. Anger, sadness, joy. He made me feel it all. No one else had that kind of effect on me. No one.”