I don't feel like a trauma victim. I feel like a house after a fire. And sometimes I fell like someone who died but stayed in his body. And sometimes I feel like someone else died, like someone else sacrificed everything, so that I can have a normal life.
With wings.
And a tail.
And vampires.
And magicians.
And a boy in my arms, instead of a girl.
And a happy ending—even if it isn't the ending I ever would have dreamt for myself, or hoped for.
A chance.

Killers aren't always assassins. Sometimes, they don't even have blood on their hands.

We were exiles from reality that summer. We were refugees from ourselves.

Some people's lives seem to flow in a narrative; mine had many stops and starts. That's what trauma does. It interrupts the plot. You can't process it because it doesn't fit with what came before or what comes afterward. A friend of mine, a soldier, put it this way. In most of our lives, most of the time, you have a sense of what is to come. There is a steady narrative, a feeling of "lights, camera, action" when big events are imminent. But trauma isn't like that. It just happens, and then life goes on. No one prepares you for it.

One thing you who had secure or happy childhoods should understand about those of us who did not: we who control our feelings, who avoid conflicts at all costs, or seem to seek them, who are hypersensitive, self-critical, compulsive, workaholic and above all survivors…we’re not that way from perversity, and we cannot just let it go. We’ve learned to cope in ways you never had to.

 “So how’d you do it? How did you get to where you aren’t scared all the freaking time?”
Erin’s smile drooped a little, tired with the effort.
 “You’re making an assumption,” she said. “Just hang in there. It’ll get easier.”
 “But not better,” Alexander said.
 “But not better.