It hurt to love. It hurts to love. But we love anyway.

When you stare out a window at a snowstorm, if you just stare straight into it and let your eyes go a little blurry, then the snow falls impossibly fast and you think, no storm has ever been as fast as this one has. The wind has never been this strong. And if it keeps falling this quickly then eventually you think the entire world will be whited out in miniature brush stokes, and you won’t be able to see the apartment across the street for the rest of your life, let alone be able to leave your room.

But if you stare into it, and then let your eyes snag onto one snowflake in particular, suddenly it’s like the snow is moving in slow motion. And you’re flying along with the snowflake, and you can see its path as it cuts through the air and bumps into the other snowflakes and eventually hits your bedroom window and dissolves into water, instantly, in a transformation so quick and flawless you can’t see it, and it streams down the pane until it finally disappears over the sill.

I loved this book, I love this book so deeply that it made my entire body feel like the blizzard currently raging outside. I was shaking for the last hundred pages, just rattling in my skin, breaking out in an ugly cold sweat from the sheer amount of energy my body was creating, my brain racing in my skull. I tried to listen to music but everything was wrong. This book needed silence. This book needed every ounce of my attention. This book was a snowflake that needed to be held onto so tightly, but at the same time you can’t, really, because the second it meets the heat of your palm it’d melt.

My experience with OCD is something I don’t talk about. Partly because it’s embarrassing, and scary, and partly because I just couldn’t put it into words. One particularly bad patch when I was thirteen resulted in a broken closet door, and a broken bedroom door, and countless hours staring at my ceiling fan and keeping my limbs so tight against my body they went under it, like they were holding me up, before I could finally fall asleep with the final thought of, “If it kills you, it kills you, so be it.”

This book said everything I couldn’t say. I already knew how powerful John Green is as a writer, and as a human being: the majority of my liked videos on YouTube are from vlogbrothers, four minute clips of John and Hank saying everything I never could. From simple thoughts about life, to revelations about how to live with a chronic disorder. Even if I’m not particularly active in the nerdfighter community, I still feel at home whenever I see them, or hear them talk, or read their words. And don’t get me started on what TFIOS did for me, or what Looking for Alaska did for my friends.

But this book might be my second favorite in the world. Right under Zusak’s I Am The Messenger, right above Jandy Nelson’s I’ll Give You The Sun. This book made me feel seen, and like I might be crazy, but it wasn’t a hopeless kind of crazy. Your mental illness, in all its iterations and complexities, might wreak havoc on your life and your relationships and your self-esteem… but you’re not doomed.

This story is a single snowflake, a single life, one that could’ve been lost in the blur of other lives, but Green made us look at it, and hold on to it, and try to begin to understand it.

It isn’t an easy read, and sometimes it’s downright scary as hell. But I can’t recommend it enough.

We’re here because we’re here, because we’re here, because we’re here.

xx,
M.