Snapshots, moments, mere seconds: as fragile and beautiful and hopeless as a single butterfly, flapping on against a gathering wind.

All of you, wherever you are: in your spiny cities, or your one-bump towns. Find it, the hard stuff, the links of metal and chink, the fragments of stone filling your stomach. And pull, and pull, and pull. I will make a pact with you: I will do it if you will do it, always and forever. Take down the walls.

The worst is knowing I can't tell anybody what's happening -or what's happened- to me. Not even my mom.

Love, the deadliest of all things: It kills you both when you have it and when you don't. But that isn't it, exactly. The condemner and the condemned. The executioner; the blade; the last-minute reprieve; the gasping breath and the rolling sky above you and the thank you, thank you, thank you God. Love: It will kill you and save you, both.

Not gray, exactly. Right before the sun rises there's a moment when the whole sky goes this pale nothing color-not really gray but sort of, or sort of white, and I've always really liked it because it reminds me of waiting for something good to happen.

She liked that word: we. It sounded warm and open, like a hug.

This is what we are made for: promises, pledges, and sworn oaths of obedience.