Dieting fooled you into thinking you could control your life.

There comes a moment, when you get lost in the woods, when the woods begin to feel like home.

Scars crossed her welded wrists.

It was like autumn, looking at her. it was like driving up north to see the colors.

We felt the imprisonment of being a girl, the way it made your mind active and dreamy, and how you ended up knowing which colors went together. We knew that the girls were our twins, that we all existed in space like animals with identical skins, and that they knew everything about us though we couldn’t fathom them at all. We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.

My change from girl to boy was far less dramatic than the distance anybody travels from infancy to adulthood.

But that was in the days when they expected perils to come from without, and nothing made less sense by that time than a survival room buried in a house itself becoming one big coffin.