Francesca Zappia

What you loved as a child, you will love forever

Did you meet your soul mate? That always happens on the first day of school, right?''Oh God, Charlie, she's letting you read again! You went straight to the paranormal section, didn't you?

I do have friends. Maybe they live hundreds of miles away from me, and maybe I can only talk to them through a screen, but they're still my friends.

It kind of felt like she was kicking me in the gut, and every kick

I am real. This___e put his other hand over the first-__s real. You see me interacting with other people all day long, don__ you? I talk to people; I affect things in the world. I cause things to happen. I am real.___ut-but what if this whole place_-I had to suck in air again-__hat if everything is inside my head? East Shoal and Scarlet and this bridge and you-what if you__e not real because nothing is real?___f nothing__ real, then what does it matter?_ he said. __ou live here. Doesn__ that make it real enough?

Sometimes I think people take reality for granted.

If nothing__ real, then what does it matter?_ he said. __ou live here. Doesn__ that make it real enough?

Intelligence is not measured by how much you know, but by how much you have the capacity to learn.

Broken people don't hide from their monsters. Broken people let themselves be eaten.

People say teenagers think they're immortal, and I agree with that. But I think there's a difference between thinking you're immortal and knowing you can survive. Thinking you're immortal leads to arrogance, thinking you deserve the best. Surviving means having the worst thrown at you and being able to continue on despite that. It means striving for what you want most, even when it seems our of your reach, even when everything is working against you.

Mile's fingers pressed into the small of my back. "Basorexia," he mumbled."Gesundheit."He laughed. "It's an overwhelming desire to kiss.""I thought you weren't good at figuring out what you felt.""I'm probably using the word in the wrong context. But I'm pretty sure that's what this is.

The rest of the year, I wondered if the point of Christmas was just spending money and getting fat and opening gifts. Indulging.But when Christmas finally comes, and that warm, tingly, mints-and-sweaters-and-fireplace-fires feeling gathers in the bottom of your stomach, and you're lying on the floor with all the lights off but the ones on the Christmas tree, and listening to the silence of the snow falling outside, you see the point. For that one instance in time, everything is good in the world. It doesn't matter if everything isn't actually good. It's the one time of the year when pretending is enough.

I was a schizophrenic, not a damn invalid.

I didn't have the luxury of taking reality for granted. And I wouldn't say I hated people who did, because that's just about everyone. I didn't hate them. They didn't live in my world. But that never stopped me from wishing I lived in theirs.

Believing something existed and then finding out it didn't was like reaching the top of the stairs and thinking there was one more step.

I realized everyone around me was wearing a uniform. Black pants, white button-down shirts, green ties. Gotta love the smell of institutional equality in the morning.

I was the big sister. I was supposed to set and example and lead the way so people would say, 'Hey, you're Alex's sister, aren't you? You two look exactly alike!' instead of 'Hey, you're Alex's sister, aren't you? Are you crazy, too?'The only example I was ever going to set for her was to always check her food before she ate it.