Glenda Millard

You might think what I tell you next is all a dream, or that I've imagined it. I can't help it if that's what you think, but I swear it's true. Sometimes the truest things are the hardest to believe.

You don't tell anyone things like that about your friends, even when you're mad at them.

Sometimes I can see colour without opening my eyes. I saw that Billy's heart was no colour and every colour. Like water or diamonds or crystals, it's pure and reflects the light.

... we sat back and let the moon shine itself all over her, and we saw that Tia was full of light. Billy said that when we die the darkness leaves us.'We're pure and perfect then,' he said, 'the way we are when we're born.

Sometimes words come out of me and I don't know where they come from or why. They're like falling stars tumbling through the universe; bright, burning things that can't be stopped.

I saw pearls in her mouth and the velvet cushion of her tongue and I heard the magic words come out of her.

I didn't understand right away what she meant. But her words soaked through my skull like warm oil, behind my eyes, down my spine and into the empty space inside me.

I know that sentence is long and has too many joining words in it but sometimes, when I'm angry, words burst out of me like a shout, or, if I'm sad, they spill out of me like tears, and if I'm happy my words are like a song. If that happens it's one of my rules not to change them because they're coming out of my heart and not my head, and that's the way they're meant to be.

I couldn't remember anyone hugging me like that before.

... and all we knew about her that we didn't know the night before was that she had eyes like pansies and skin like the moon.

Through the night we drove in a tangle of waking and sleeping, nightmares from hell and holy white dreams.

..so Grandpa turned the rusty latchkey of his magnificent remembery and set free a symphony of stories

We walked back the way we came, and even though it was dark there were no lights burning inside the houses. They were like people without hearts; raspberry tarts without the jam.

Then I kissed Max because I loved him, and everyone I had ever loved before had gone away and I had never kissed them goodbye.

I didn't know what to say when someone's given you a small free kiss in the dark ...

Sometimes it's better to live without a mother than not to live at all.

She reminded me of the sea; the way she came dancing towards you, wild and beautiful, and just when she was almost close enough to touch she'd rush away again.

... I'll tell her about Tia. I'll tell her how beautiful she was and how brave. And I'll tell her the most important thing of all: that her mother loved her better than her life.