L.A. kills people.' Jacaranda said. 'You're lucky you're leaving. You'll be able to write.' She looked paler, going through another depression, smoking in bed in her lilac room. The walls were the color of her veins. She was getting too thin, even for the modeling. . .Jacaranda died last winter when the flowering trees were bare. You couldn't even tell which ones once cried the purple blossoms she named herself after.

War is being reminded that you are completely at the mercy of death at every moment, without the illusion that you are not. Without the distractions that make life worth living.

You are so intense. Like a storm. It's shocking how intense you are.

She was no longer a slow dreamer watching the flowers grow. She was a warrior now. Warriors need something to fight for though, beside their lives, because otherwise their lives will not be worth it.

We got quiet. The garden was combing her hair and putting on earrings. The house was full of dancing creatures, not male and female but both, two lovers in one body. The books downstairs were reciting their poetry to each other, rubbing together, whispering through the leather covers. Wine was flowing through the water pipes. You had caught my leaping heart in your hand like a fish.

Pain didn't ever really stop, he thought; it just changed forms.

I didn't tell him that what I was most scared of, most haunted by, was something I didn't understand and could never run away from. It was myself.