That was our first time together. Interesting, an interesting experience, but not earth-shaking. But then, I never expected it to be earth-shaking, not with him.

What I was determined to avoid was emotional entanglement. A passing fling was one thing, an affair of the heart quite another.

Of myself I was fairly sure. I was not about to lose my heart to a man about whom I knew next to nothing.

Lebanon, Israel, Ireland, South Africa - wherever there is a bleeding sore on the body of the world, the same hard-eyed narrow-minded fanatics are busy, indifferent to life, in love with death.

Who are you anyway? What are you even doing here?”
“Haven,” she said quietly, peeking at him.
He gazed at her peculiarly. “Heaven? No, this definitely isn't Heaven. But I get why you’re confused, since I'm standing in front of you.” She stared at him, and he
cracked a smile. “I'm kidding. Well, kinda… I have been told I've taken a girl to Heaven a time or two.”
“Haven, not Heaven,” she said, louder than before. Nothing about the conversation made sense to her. “My name’s Haven.

Colpo di fulmine. The thunderbolt, as Italians call it. When love strikes someone like lightning, so powerful and intense it can’t be denied. It’s beautiful and messy,
cracking a chest open and spilling their soul out for the world to see. It turns a person inside out, and there’s no going back from it. Once the thunderbolt hits, your life is
irrevocably changed.

No papers, no money; no family, no friends, no sense of who you are. The obscurest of the obscure, so obscure as to be a prodigy.

Sleep is no longer a healing bath, a recuperation of vital forces, but an oblivion, a nightly brush with annihilation.