You have to understand. I am no one special. I am just a single girl. I am five feet two inches tall and I am in-between in every way. But I have a secret. You can build walls all the way to the sky and I will find a way to fly above them. You can try to pin me down with a hundred thousand arms, but I will find a way to resist.

Something aches at the very core of me, something ancient and deep and stronger than words: the filament that joins each of us to the root of existence, that ancient thing unfurling and resisting and grappling, desperately, for a foothold, a way to stay here, breathe, keep going.

Maybe before you die, it's your ghosts you see.

I need to live my life in the light of their deaths. I need to live.

A room full of words that are nearly the truth but not quite, each note fluttering off the steam of its rose like a broken butterfly wing.

My first kiss. A new kind of kiss, like the new kind of music still playing, softly, in the distance - wild and arrhythmic, desperate. Passionate.

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.