That's the thing about best friends. That's what they do. They keep you from spinning off the edge.

It occurs to me that for a long time she has been doing her own version of resisting.

It's surprisingly nice out here, peaceful and pretty-strange to be standing in the middle of a little garden while enclosed by the massive stone walls of the prison, like being at the exact center of a hurricane, and finding peace and silence in the middle of so much shrieking damage.

It's as though the words are trapped, buried under past fears, past lives, like fossils compressed under layers of dirt.

You can try to pin me down with a hundred thousand arms, but I will find a way to resist

And it's the funniest thing: as soon as I see it, the whistling in my ears stops and the feeling of terror drains away, and I realize this whole time I haven't been falling at all. I've been floating.

I don't understand how everything changes, how the layers of your life get buried. Impossible. At some point, at some time, we must all explode.