Empathy is wonderful, but you can still overdose on it if you try too much to fast.

I’m sorry I left without telling you,” she says. “I wasn’t ready. I wanted it so much, and I wasn’t ready for that.

I learn that I am a tiny piece of a miraculous world.

I could say the night felt magical, but that would be embellishment. That would be romanticization. What it actually felt like was life.

Friendship is about more than facts. It’s about knowing what someone is thinking, or knowing enough to know that you don’t. But I guess it’s also about not letting too much time go by without asking them questions, so you don’t end up looking at them one afternoon, the sun so bright you have to squint, realizing that you hardly recognize the person they’ve become.

There’s something fairy-tale-like about it, which is perfect, because fairy tales are all about innocence and ill will and the inevitability of terrible things. They’re all about the moment when a girl is no longer who she once was.

I wonder if there’s a secret current that connects people who have lost something. Not in the way that everyone loses something, but in the way that undoes your life, undoes your self, so that when you look at your face it isn’t yours anymore.

It’s a dark place, not knowing.

Everyone is always telling my generation that we aren’t going to know how to engage with people. We’re all going to end up with computer chips implanted in our brains and screens stuck in our eyes like contact lenses. But no one gives us any solutions, so I decided to find my own.

I am not a darling. I am a girl ready to explode into nothing.