“My eyes are two professional pickpockets, stealing everything away in my mind. I lose track of the minutes we trample over.”

“I study every quivering branch, every imposing soldier, every window I can count. My eyes are two professional pickpockets, stealing everything to store away in my mind.”

“He looks away.And he smiles.Its the kind of smile that makes me forget how to do everything but blink and blink and I don't understand what's happening to me. I don't know why I cant convince my eyes to find something else to focus on.I don't know why my heart is losing its mind.”

“This girl is destroying me. A girl who has spent the last year in an insane asylum. A girl who would try to shoot me dead for kissing her. A girl who ran off with another man just to get away from me. Of course this is the girl I would fall for. I close a hand over my mouth. I am losing my mind.”

“The books...they helped keep me from losing my mind altogether.”

“My eyes break open. Two shattered windows filling my mouth with glass.”

“Sometimes I close my eyes and paint these walls a different color. I imagine I’m wearing warm socks and sitting by a fire. I imagine someone’s given me a book to read, a story to take me away form the torture of my own mind. I want to be someone else somewhere else with something else to fill my mind. I want to run, to feel the wind tug at my hair. I want to pretend that this is just a story within a story. That this cell is just a scene, that these hands don’t belong to me, that this window leads to somewhere beautiful if only I could break it. I pretend this pillow is clean, I pretend this bed is soft. I pretend and pretend and pretend until the world becomes so breathtaking behind my eyelids that I can no longer contain it. But then my eyes fly open and I’m caught around the throat by a pair of hands that won’t stop suffocating suffocating suffocating. My thoughts, I think, will soon be sound. My mind, I hope, will soon be found.”