“I'm so dopesick, my tears taste like urine. It's as if the air itself were made of broken glass. I try to stop twitching. To stay still, to stop my very breath, let the pain stay inside. The slightest movement grinds tiny shards into my pores. Breathing is like gulping from a bag of claws. I want to die. Want to pass out. Want to stop...this...fucking...feeling.”

“I don't know how I'm going to do this, move through the hours like someone who wants to still be breathing when I had so firmly made up my mind to stop.”

“I don’t want to be in pain anymore. I want to be done, to be left unburdened and naked, to tear the hurt off my body like layers of clothes. At the end of the trail I stop and bend forward, hands on my knees, to catch my breath. I’m not healed, but for this moment, I’m better.”

“I want to stay," he admitted. "I haven't felt this way in a long time. I feel like ... like I came up from being underwater, and I can finally breathe. I don't want to stop feeling that way. That's how I know I have to leave.”

“But her brown eyes made me stop breathing. They made me stop thinking. It was like a sick game and I wanted out of it because I knew I'd lose.”

“ I want to hold my breath for as long as it takes.I want to stop breathing just long enough to know what it would be like to be totally sitll. Like being a cough away from death.Not really there- not really here.”