He had a face like a song that gets stuck in your head, and eyes that made you feel a little unsure. Kind of like...universes, dying, somewhere far away.

She wrote that then stared at it, wondering what it would taste like to say it out loud, to push the words out of her mouth in a whisper, to scream them from some rooftop somewhere. They looked wrong on a page. Too much like schoolwork or fiction.

Narration's so much easier, so much safer sometimes. Anything and everything's as true as you want to make it, because you know that it's not. Nobody can say that you're lying, because you are. It made sense, somehow, when she closed her eyes and pretended as hard as she could that those words weren't true.

Sometimes, pretending just doesn't cut it.