Prologue

     One thing I learned last year was that you can never know which people will change you, which ones will make you laugh or cry, make you want them or desperately need them. The lucky ones notice each other immediately, those ‘love at first sight’ kind of couples, some people don’t see their person and have to be reminded over and over again that their person is even out there. I let my person pass me by for nearly a year, not looking at her twice, I made her fall in love with me without even realizing she cared, for what it’s worth I’m not great at reading emotions but I thought this would be something I could see. For those of you that belong to the Collective Schizophrenia Association that is the Catholic Church, yes I said she...multiple times. I am she. I, Molly Ada Ratliff, am a lesbian she. Take a deep breath, take in this information, deal with it.
   Moving on, If you had told me on the first of January last year that a two year old letter would make me want to cut out my lungs so she could breathe easily, that every ‘dot, dot, dot’ in every text she sends would send shivers of worry down my spine or that each star on every American flag I pass in the car would make my day just a little bit brighter, I would say you were madder than a box of frogs. Then again I didn’t know that I would fall head over heals for a girl with the most melodious name I have ever heard. At that time I hardly knew that inexplicably beautiful, wonderful, thoughtful human-being that is my Sarah Pearl.
I met her November 2010, after just being dumped by my emo-kid, now gay, boyfriend Nick Mitchell, mostly because I had never wanted to go out with him in the first place, but that’s a different story. We were at this really nerdy meet up for really nerdy people who are all addicted to this show where countries were personified as people. Where we split in to two groups she went to one, I went to the other and I never really noticed her until February, but then again the girl with the blue hair is pretty hard to miss. We were at yet another one of these meet ups and the group of really nerdy people had grown so I, being completely myself, only remember the people who I had hung out with on my own, Sarah wasn’t in this group. Although I didn’t really talk to her that day it’s the first real memory I had of her, the girl brave enough to go Happy Wheels dressed as Sailor Neptune.