for the world is hollow and i have touched the sky

On a flight to LA I struck up a conversation with the woman sitting next to me, idle chitchat while we waited for the plane to take off. In the air my husband pulled out a book, but the light above his seat was broken. Our new friend in the window seat insisted on loaning him her travel book-light. Shortly after, I pulled out my kindle on which I was reading Everything Is Tuburculosis. It opened on a particularly medical page. She asked if I was studying for med school. I explained what the book is about, and she was fascinated. A minute later she asked "Since I finished my book in the airport and I can't get my phone on the wifi, would you be offended if I read your book with you? I can see from here just fine."

And so for the next 2.5 hours or so this stranger and I quietly read your book side by side. Our reading pace was (thankfully) the same and every now and then she would silently point to something she found especially poignant or whisper a quiet "Wow" or "I never knew that."

For a few hours your book gave a strange sense of human connection to this childless 29 year old from CT on her way to a Bat Mitzvah in LA and a 60-some year old woman from Romania going to visit her daughter in Denver.

At the end of the flight she wrote down "John Green" in the notes app on her phone so she can finish the book, and get a copy for her daughter too.

Chestnut-colored Woodpecker (Celeus castaneus), EAT A TASTY BANABA!!!, male, family Picidae, order Piciformes, Costa Rica

I am the culmination of one man's dream. This is not ego or vanity, but when Dr. Soong created me, he added to the substance of the universe. If, by your experiments, I am destroyed, something unique, something wonderful will be lost. I cannot permit that, I must protect his dream.

make me choose: @barbreys asked: katara/aang or katara/zuko?