Auppy

“I can’t lose the thing I’ve held onto for so long, you know?” My face twists up from the pain of pushing it out. “I just really need it to be a love story, you know? I really, really need it to be that.”
“I know,” she says.
“Because if it isn’t a love story, then what is it”? I look to her glassy eyes, her face of wide open empathy. “It’s my life,” I say. “This has been my whole life.”
― Kate Elizabeth Russell, My Dark Vanessa

“Nothing you can take from me was ever worth keeping.”
― Suzanne Collins, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes

“It is so appropriate to color hope yellow, like the sun we seldom saw. And as I begin to copy from the old memorandum journals that I kept for so long, a title comes as if inspired. 'Open the Window and Stand in the Sunshine.' Yet, I hesitate to name our story that. For I think of us more as flowers in the attic.”
― V.C. Andrews, Flowers in the Attic

“I want to know
what it means to survive
something.
does it just mean
I get to keep my body?”
― Olivia Gatwood, Life of the Party