coming-of-age

You haunt my days and dreams.

Each time that I have felt like I might finally be figuring some things out, life has decided to change the rules and I__e had to start all over again.

We do not want to be told what we know. We do not want to call things by their names, although we're willing to call one another bad ones. We call meanness nobility and hatred honor. The way to make yourself a hero is to make me out a scoundrel. You won't admit that either, but it's true.

Kipster is a perfectly valid word,_ Wendy argued, about to write down her score on the little notepad that had come with the game. __kay, so what does it mean?_ Mandy wanted to know. Wendy struggled to come up with an answer, and finally just changed the subject with school gossip. Mandy found herself just ignoring it_ it always sounded the same, the same events, same rumors, same secrets, same affairs, but never anything of interest to her.__ell Sarah__ on drugs again and that__ why she did it in Mario__ backseat, but now she might be pregnant, oh, and that messed-up Seth kid__ been cutting himself again so he was sent away to Halifax last week, and there__ a festival in Wolfville but Kathy won__ go because Audrey-Rose is going to be there and they hate each other, and_.__andy had learned two years ago to detach herself from gossip; she__ learned it from Jud__ death. Wendy may have been eighteen years old but she could be immature on the best of days.

This town of churches and dreams; this town I thought I would lose myself in, with its backward ways and winding roads leading to nowhere; but, I found myself instead. -Magic in the Backyard (excerpt from American Honey)

Children__ and YA books are about being brave and kind, about learning wisdom and love, about that journey into and through maturity that we all keep starting, and starting again, no matter how old we get. I think that__ why so many adults read YA: we__e never done coming of age.

What a wonderful word, future. Of all the abstractions we can articulate to ourselves, of all the concepts we have that other animals do not, how extraordinary the ability to consider a time that's never been experienced. And how tragic not to consider it. It galls us, we with such a limited future, to see someone brush it aside as meaningless, when it has an endless capacity for meaning, and an endless number of meanings that can be found within it.

To be honest, I__e always made films and I never really stopped, starting with little stop-motion experiments using my dad__ Super 8 camera. In my mind, it__ all one big continuum of filmmaking and I__e never changed.

But wasn__ time for what was. Was time to settle up the future.

He could pour himself into my little paper cup heart and my emptiness would finally have a meaning.

I wish that love could be broken down the way it breaks me down.

I ruin everything. I think that a bullet must have passed through my heart when I was very young, causing me to bleed out slowly, over things and people and every white surface that I__ ever come across.

That last time you kissed me my heart slid past your teeth down into the center of your chest_ trapping us both in a stainless cage.

Be willing to turn your attention to that which serves you.

I don__ ever want to hurt anyone, but I really wish there was something like a reset button on my life.

I feel like a paper cut just waiting to bleed.

I wish on one of the stars for divine orchestration and save the rest of them for all of the other girls in the world who will feel like I do tonight.

Standing naked on the beach with all of my secrets between my legs, I look out into the water and up deep into the stars. I beg the sparkling lanterns of light to cure me of myself_