I feel as though the world is a friendly boy walking along in the sun.

I kissed him and let that emotion consume me, to settle the pain that had risen inside my soul__o heal the pain I knew he felt. I let it consume and override the doubt that all we really needed was one another. That this empty hole could be filled with the love we felt for one another.

...there was no point in sighing after what I could not have. It only distracted me from what I did have.

She'd cried over a broken heart before. She knew what that felt like, and it didn't feel like this. Her heart felt not so much broken as just ... empty. It felt like she was an outline empty in the middle. The outline cried senselessly for the absent middle. The past cried for the present that was nothing.

Nobody had forgotten anything here. In Berlin, you had to wrestle with the past, you had to build on the ruins, inside them. It wasn't like America where we scraped the earth clean, thinking we could start again every time.

There is even rhythm in being empty.