There’s a limit to how much living can be done in a life without freedom.

The seeds are tiny, unborn things, and I resent them. They'll be planted and they'll grow into exactly what they're meant to be.

We can change so many times in our lives. We're born into a family, and it's the only life we can imagine, but it changes. Buildings collapse. Fires burn. And the next second we're someplace else entirely, going through different motions and trying to keep up with this new person we've become.

But there’s no such thing as free. There are only different and more horrible ways to be enslaved.

The sullen boy sitting before me is not my husband, and the girl he is fretting over isn't me, will never be me.

And everywhere girls, tumbling from trees like orange blossoms and hitting the earth with sickening thuds. They crack open.

There is a silence so great that I can hear the ice crystals cracking and falling from eyelashes of girls who will never blink again.