“We’re all meant to lean on something. Or someone.' I smile. He frowns. He surprises me and grabs the pen out of my hand. He starts writing something down in his neat block letters. He slides the journal back to me. 'I build walls around myself. I lean on those.' I don’t need to ask him why. Everybody builds walls—it’s for protection. I scribble quickly. 'Maybe you should break the walls down once in a while.' 'I’ll just build them up again', he writes. 'But maybe you’ll add a few windows the next time around. Or a door?”

“He walked ahead of me down the hall and I was careful to keep a few steps behind him. I needed the distance. Close human contact was starting to scare me. In the past few weeks, all I'd known around people was pain. When people were face-to-face, tragedy struck. A look felt like a bee sting. It started to seem natural to be separated from people. I craved being alone. No one could hurt me inside my wall screens. They were slowly becoming a comfort, a cushion between me and the harsh world outside. I was stepping out of it less and less.”

“Gray yells that he can't just let me go because you don't give up on the people you love, but maybe I need to lose someone in order to understand that."You're dreaming," he says. "Call me when you decide to wake up.”

“Or maybe, in my gut, I felt like I was missing out on something. I knew there was more to life than a pixelated curtain. There was a wide, expansive world all around me and I was confined to live inside such a narrow one. And I wanted to break free.”

“It’s amazing to think where adventure can lead when you trust your crazy ideas, when you’re bold enough to look at only what lies ahead of you. I don’t want the normal life. I don’t want to go to college because it’s the next practical step, just to join the pack, just to follow a leader. I don’t want to sit inside a room under fluorescent lights and study and read and memorize other people’s ideas about the world. I want to form my own ideas. I want to experience the world with my own eyes. I’m not going to follow my old friends to avoid the effort of making new ones. I don’t want to settle for any job just to get a paycheck, just to pay rent, just to need furniture and cable and more bills and be tied down with routine and monotony. I don’t want to own things because they’ll eventually start to own me. Most importantly, I don’t want to be told who I am or who I should be. I want to find myself—the bits and pieces that are scattered in places and in people waiting to meet me. If I fall down, I’ll learn how to pick myself up again. You need to fall apart once in a while before you understand how you best fit together.”

“I rolled my eyes. "He's talking to himself. My vote is he's crazy." He thought about this. "Maybe he's normal and we're the crazy ones. Maybe everyone should talk to themselves. Maybe we're all just afraid of what we'd say.”

“You let me be who I am. So many people ask me why I need to take pictures all the time. Why I'm staring at something they can't see. It's like I have to apologize for having eyes. But you've never rushed me. I'm at my best around you. You're my nova. You light me up.”