This is the past: It drifts, it gathers. If you are not careful, it will bury you.

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.

Old words; words that nearly brought me to my knees. Live free or die

But maybe happiness isn't in the choosing. Maybe it's in the fiction, in the pretending: that wherever we have ended up is where we intended to be all along.

Dystopian novels help people process their fears about what the future might look like; further, they usually show that there is always hope, even in the bleakest future.

That's what time does: We stand stubbornly like rocks while it flows all around us, believing that we are immutable - and all the time we're being carved, and shaped, and whittled away.

Don't worry about what you're writing or whether it's good or even whether it makes sense.