"He started the whole mess with those ice blue eyes that kept me begging for my right to exist. But she doesn’t know what it’s like to love someone who doesn’t care whether you live or die. She doesn’t yet realize that love unreturned eventually transforms into a fierce tangled mess, nerves and entrails exposed like split animal innards. She doesn’t understand that sometimes the unrequited must demand reparations, that love can be a mean and spiteful process, that sometimes one loses patience with love.

So, when the nerves and guts have seemingly been packed away, sewn in and cleaned up so as not to make all the innocent bystanders uncomfortable, the carrier of this love becomes heavy with a toxic lump that grows, slowly and steadily, into a fierce ball of scarred tissue.

Located two ribs below the heart, it is called hate."