Do you have it on your person?" my father asked. "Jesus" I replied. "My person has it in her purse.

It was a sort of ferocious, quiet beauty, the sort that wouldn't let you admire it. The sort of beauty that always hurt.

Nothing had changed. Nothing.

I could just barely see the dark curve of his shoulder, and something about the shape it made, the gesture it suggested, filled me with a sort of fierce, awful affection.

They were always walking away from him. But he never seemed able to walk away from them.

Hers was a memory made up of snapshorts: being dragged through the snow by a pack of wolves, first kiss tasting of oranges, saying goodbye behind a cracked windshield. A life made up of promises of what could be: the possibilities contained in a stack of college applications, the thrill of sleeping under a strange roof, the future that lay in Sam's smile. It was a life I didn't want to leave behind. It was a life I didn't want to forget I wasn't done with it yet. There was so much more to say.

I was wild and tame and pulled into shreds and crushed into being all at once.