Beauty was deceptive. I would rather wear my pain, my ugliness. I was torn and stitched. I was a strip mine, and they would just have to look. I hoped I made them sick. I hoped they saw me in their dreams.

Who can judge another man's suffering?

You can't shape me anymore. I am the uncontrolled element, the random act. I am forward movement in time. You think you can see me? Then tell me, who am I? You don't know.

she’s not as pretty as you,” I said “But she’s a simpler girl,” my mother whispered.

The decor bowled me over. Everywhere I looked, there was something more to see. Botanical prints, a cross section of pomegranates, a passionflower vine and its fruit. Stacks of thick books on art and design and a collection of glass paperweights filled the coffee table. It was enormously beautiful, a sensibility I'd never encountered anywhere, a relaxed luxury. I could feel my mother's contemptuous gaze falling on the cluttered surfaces, but I was tired of three white flowers in a glass vase. There was more to life than that.

If sinners where so unhappy, why would they prefer their suffering? But now I knew why. Without my wounds, who was I?

I imagined my soul taking in these words like silicated water in the Petrified Forest, turning my wood to patterned agate. I liked it when my mother shaped me this way. I thought clay must feel happy in the good potter's hand.