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

I just want to be normal, like everybody else." "Are you sure that being like everybody else will make you happy?

I have had to give up so much, so many selves and lives already. I have grown up and out of the rubble of my old lives, of things and people I have cared for.

Perhaps this was how the sparrows did it too; perhaps they were looking so hard at the peaks and tips of the new rooftops coated with dew, and the vast new horizon, that they only forgot that they did not know how to fly until they were already in midair.

That is the rule of the Wilds: You must be bigger and stronger and tougher. You must hurt or be hurt.

We wanted the freedom to love. We wanted the freedom to choose. Now we have to fight for it.

It's so strange how life works: You want something and you wait and wait and feel like it's taking forever to come. Then it happens and it's over and all you want to do is curl back up in that moment before things changed.