“A room full of words that are nearly the truth but not quite, each note fluttering off the steam of its rose like a broken butterfly wing.”

“I reach out and grab her wrist. It feels impossibly tiny in my hand, like this one time I found a baby bird near goose Point, and I picked it up and it died there, taking its final gasping fluttering breaths in my palm.”

“Everything in me feels fluttering and free, like I could take off from the ground at any second. Music, I think, he makes me feel like music.”

“Time becomes a stutter-the space between drumbeats, splintered into fragments, and also endlessly long, as long as soaring guitar notes that melt into one another, as full as the dark mass of bodies around me. I feel like the air downstairs has gone to liquid, to sweat and smell and sound, and I have broken apart in it. I am wave: I am pulled into the everything. I am energy and noise and a heartbeat going boom, boom, boom, echoing the drums.”

“Old words; words that nearly brought me to my knees.Live free or die”

“They looked like butterflies, except that they had the long, pointed beaks of hummingbirds, and they seemed to be made out of darkness and air.”

“I wonder if this is how people always get close: They heal each other's wounds; they repair the broken skin.”