Love doesn’t have to be on Valentine’s Day. It doesn’t have to be by the time you turn eighteen or thirty-three or fifty-nine. It doesn’t have to conform to whatever is usual. It doesn’t have to be kismet at once, or rhapsody by the third day.It just has to be. In time. In place. In spirt.It just has to be.

he is both the source of my happiness and the one i want to share it with.

As a kid he wished for money or fame or toys or friends. More recent wishes were for so many other things, all of them synonymous with love or escape.

Maybe that's it, [...] [w]ith what you were talking about before. The world being broken. Maybe it isn't that we're supposed to find the pieces and put them back together. Maybe we're the pieces." [...] "Maybe [...] what we're supposed to do is come together. That's how we stop the breaking.

But I think we both knew, even then, that what we had was something even more rare, and even more meaningful. I was going to be his friend, and was going to show him possibilities. And he, in turn, would become someone I could trust more than myself.

We stay this way until twilight colours the window and the hour calls me home

It's b******* to think of friendship and romance being different. They're not. They're just variations of the same love. Variatons of the same desire to be close.

Really, weren't these facts just placeholders until the long view could really assert itself?

I can see that the sadness has returned. And it's not a beautiful sadness- beautiful sadness is a myth. Sadness turns our features to clay, not porcelain.