I wish I had a boyfriend. I wish he lived in the wardrobe on a coat hanger. Whenever I wanted, I could get him out and he’d look at me the way boys do in films, as if I’m beautiful.
I love you. I love you. I send this message through my fingers and into his, up his arm and into his heart. Hear me. I love you. And I’m sorry to leave you.
I love you. It hurts more than anything ever has, but I do. So don’t you dare tell me I don’t. Don’t you ever say it again!
I like you,” he said.He made it sound as if she was bound to disagree with him. She nodded. His face said he was telling her something very important.He said, “I mean it. Whatever happens, you have to believe that.
It’s all right, Tessa, you can go. We love you. You can go now.”Why are you saying that?”She might need permission to die, Cal.”I don’t want her to. She doesn’t have my permission.
Maybe you should say goodbye, Cal.”No.”It might be important.”It might make her die.
But all that is warm will go cold. My ears will fall off and my eyes will melt. My mouth will be clamped shut. My lips will turn to glue….No taste or smell or touch or sound.Nothing to look at. Total emptiness for ever.
Parents don’t know their children at all.No one knows anyone, in fact.
It’s as if a child with a brush and too much enthusiasm has been set free with a tin of black paint inside me.
It was only one man who had gone, but it felt like forever, something so permanent and unstoppable that it blasted her. If she were a tree, she would drop all her leaves.
I lean back on the pillows and look at the corners of the room. When I was a kid, I always wanted to live on the ceiling – it looked so clean and uncluttered, like the top of a cake.
What happens if anger takes you over, Tessa? Who will you be then? What will be left of you?
Death straps me to the hospital bed, claws its way onto my chest and sits there.I didn’t know it would hurt this much. I didn’t know that everything good that’s ever happened in my life would be emptied out by it.
You want some sweet and lovely things, Tessa, but be careful. Other people can’t always give you what you want.
He says, ‘Anything could be happening down there, but up here you just wouldn’t know it.’I know what he means. It could be pandemonium in all those little houses, everyone’s dreams in a mess. But up here feels peaceful. Clean.