All the Bright Places

Just be careful
across the fogged-up mirror.
I walk back into the room to give it another look from another angle. The
room is just as I left it, and I think maybe it isn’t the room that’s different.
Maybe it’s me.
In the bathroom again, I hang up my towel, throw on a T-shirt and boxers,
and catch sight of myself in the mirror over the sink as the steam starts to
clear and the writing fades away, leaving an oval just large enough for two
blue eyes, wet black hair, white skin. I lean in and look at myself, and it’s not
my face but someone else’s.
On my bed, I sit down and flip through the cut-up books one by one,
reading all the cut-up passages. They are happy and sweet, funny and warm. I
want to be surrounded by them, and so I clip out some of the best lines and
the very best words—like “symphony,” “limitless,” “gold,” “morning”—and
stick them on the wall, where they overlap with others, a combination of
colors and shapes and moods.
I pull the comforter up around me, as tight as I can—so that I can’t even
see the room anymore—and lie back on my bed like a mummy. It’s a way to
keep in the warmth and the light so that it can’t get out again. I reach one
hand through the opening and pick up another book and then another. What if
life could be this way? Only the happy parts, none of the terrible, not even the
mildly unpleasant. What if we could just cut out the bad and keep the good?
This is what I want to do with Violet—give her only the good, keep away the
bad, so that good is all we ever have around us.
106

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107

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VIOLET
138 days to go
Sunday night. My bedroom. I flip through our notebook, Finch’s and mine. I
pick up the pen he gave me and find a blank page. Bookmarks and the Purina
Tower aren’t official wanderings, but this doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be
remembered too.
Stars in the sky, stars on the ground. It’s hard to tell where the sky ends and
the earth begins. I feel the need to say something grand and poetic, but the
only thing I come up with is “It’s lovely.”
He says, “ ‘Lovely’ is a lovely word that should be used more often.”
Then I get an idea. Over my desk, I’ve got this enormous bulletin board,
and on it I’ve tacked black-and-white photographs of writers at work. I take
these down and dig through my desk until I come up with a stack of brightly
colored Post-its. On one of them, I write: 
lovely
.
Half an hour later, I stand back and look at the board. It is covered in
fragments—some are words or sentences that may or may not become story
ideas. Others are lines I like from books. In the last column, I have a section
for 
New Nameless Web Magazine
. On three separate Post-its I’ve tacked
beneath it: