I became something they couldn’t imagine, something they would have kept me from becoming, and that, it seems to me, was always in my nature to becom… - Alexander Chee

Love is never governed by Reason.

Most people misunderstand the crime of sexual abuse. They think of stolen youth, a child tucked under the arm and spirited away. But it isn't like someone entering your house and stealing something from you. Instead, someone leaves something with you that grows until it replaces you. They themselves were once replaced this way, and what they leave with you they have carried for years within them, like a fire guarded all this time as it burned them alive inside, right under the skin. The burning hidden to protect themselves from being revealed as burned.

...books were still to me as they had been when I found them: the only magic.