like I am Alice in the Wonderland and have gotten too big for the room.

Less than a month ago all of August still stretched before us - long and golden and reassuring, like an endless period of delicious sleep.

you have to understand. i wasn't just thinking of me. i was thinking of her, too.

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

Time becomes a stutter-the space between drumbeats, splintered into fragments, and also endlessly long, as long as soaring guitar notes that melt into one another, as full as the dark mass of bodies around me. I feel like the air downstairs has gone to liquid, to sweat and smell and sound, and I have broken apart in it. I am wave: I am pulled into the everything. I am energy and noise and a heartbeat going boom, boom, boom, echoing the drums.

The Wilds aren't safe anymore.

Here's another thing to remember: hope keeps you alive. Even when you're dead, it's the only thing that keeps you alive.