I've been so used to thinking of what the borders are keeping out that I haven't considered that they're also penning us in.

People are like ants: Just a few of them give all the orders. And most of them spend their lives getting squashed.

I still wanted to know why. As though somebody was going to answer that for me, as though any answer would be satisfying.

Eventually she came. She appeared suddenly, exactly like she'd done that day- she stepped into the sunshine, she jumped, she laughed and threw her head back, so her long ponytail nearly grazed the waistband of her jeans. After that, I couldn't think about anything else. The mole on the inside of her right elbow, like a dark blot of ink. The way she ripped her nails to shreds when she was nervous. Her eyes, deep as a promise. Her stomach, pale and soft and gorgeous, and the tiny dark cavity of her belly button. I nearly went crazy.

That’s what made it so frightening to the lawmakers: Love obeys no laws other than its own.

In a world without love, this is what people are to each other: values, benefits, and liabilities, numbers and data. We weigh, we quantify, we measure, and the soul is ground to dust.

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.