Hearts aren’t chessboards, and they don’t play by the rules.

It turns out that once you begin, habit and memory keep your body moving in the right directions, like a wound-up clock ticking dutifully through the seconds.

When I was younger I cried over everything from sneers to sad endings, and even once over a puddle of tadpoles that dried up in the sun, but at some point I learned the trick of stoicism: you hide. You pull yourself inside your castle walls and crank up the drawbridge and watch everything from the tallest tower.

That afternoon, sitting in that lonely field beside the Door that didn’t lead anywhere, I wanted to write a different kind of story. A true kind of story, something I could crawl into if only I believed it hard enough.

There is nothing quite like the anger of someone very powerful, who has been thwarted by someone who was supposed to be weak.

Companions. See the curve of that C like a pair of outstretched arms? It implied the sort of friends who might slay dragons or go on hopeless quests or swear blood oaths at midnight.

Sometimes I feel there are doors lurking in the creases of every sentence, with periods for knobs and verbs for hinges.

Let this ignoble origin story stand as an invaluable lesson to you that a person’s beginnings do not often herald their endings, for Adelaide Lee did not grow into another pale Larson woman. She became something else entirely, something so radiant and while and fierce that a single world could not contain her, and she was obliged to find others.

Now I was alone, and the only path was the one I left behind me.

The point is that I was scared and hurt and alone sometimes but in the end I won. I’m free. And if that’s the price for being free, I’ll pay it.