[Insert Quote Here]

Is that what art is? To be touched thinking what we feel is ours when, in the end, it was someone else, in longing, who finds us?

I know. It's not fair that the word laughter is trapped inside slaughter. We'll have to cut it open, you and I, like a newborn lifted, red and trembling, from a just-shot doe.

Sometimes being offered tenderness feels like the very proof you've been ruined.

What do you call the animal that, finding the hunter, offers itself to be eaten? A martyr? A weakling? No, a beast gaining the rare agency to stop. Yes, the period in the sentence-it's what makes us human. Ma, I swear it. It lets us stop in order to keep going.

When does a war end? When I can say your name and have it mean only your name and not what you left behind?

If we are lucky, the end of a sentence is where we might begin. If we are lucky, something is passed on, another alphabet written in the blood, sinew, and neuron; ancestors charging their kin with the silent propulsion to fly south, to turn towards the place in the narrative no one was meant to outlast.

I am writing because they told me to never start a sentence with because. But I wasn't trying to make a sentence - I was trying to break free. Because freedom. I am told, is nothing but the distance between the hunter and its prey.

When people see tears, they stop listening to your hands or your words or anything else you have to say. And it doesn't matter if the tears are angry or sad, frightened or frustrated. All they see is a girl crying.