“For anyone who wants it all,” she begins, “may you find something that is more than enough.” She wonders whether what comes next could ever live up to the expectations. She doesn’t know. You never can. She turns the page anyway.

Maybe love shouldn’t be built on a foundation of compromises, but maybe it can’t exist without them either. Not the kind that forces two people into shapes they don’t fit in, but the kind that loosens their grips, always leaves room to grow. Compromises that say, there will be a you-shaped space in my heart, and if your shape changes, I will adapt.

Half volume.

Maybe it’s possible to belong in a hundred different ways to a hundred different people and places.

It was like he’d been living at half volume until that moment.

Because nothing—not the beautiful and not the terrible—lasts.

There’s still no happy ending for a woman who wants it all, the kind who lies awake aching with furious hunger, unspent ambition making her bones rattle in her body.

“Please don’t apologize for letting me know you.”

the shadowy monster of grief and fear and anger has been in the corner where I locked it, but it’s been growing, new ropes of angry black lashing out in every direction, starving, mad with hunger. A demon that’s going to devour me from the inside out.