“Despair dragged at me like an anchor, pulling me down. I closed my eyes and retreated to some dim place within, where there was nothing but an aching grey blankness…”

“This darkness is for sleeping, for escape; it's where I go when the other places ache with light; this is where I curl up and close my eyes and darkness flows like lava, and I dissapear into what, into nothing, into pure dark, into what there is before there is anything else.”

“Alone had always felt like an actual place to me, as if it weren't a state of being, but rather a room where I could retreat to be who I really was.”

“I pulled myself together and retreated to the coffee shop’s bathroom to refresh. Sol’s eyes caressed my body as I walked away, the soft stroke of a feather up and down my skin, and the attention didn’t make me feel uncomfortable in the least. I smiled as I suddenly realized I’d subconsciously put an extra roll in my hips. Truthfully, it pleased me to think he might be as attracted to me as I was to him.”

“It was enough to make me feel like retreating into some wooded or snowy clime, where only the most determined photographers or Mary-hunters might find me.”

“Ah, I could lay me down in this long grassAnd close my eyes, and let the quiet windBlow over me”