I fell over twice. It was loud. The garden was black outside our circle of light. The endless night stretched all around us, so we told each other that we had to be close together, together in the dark.

I ate and read my book, this particular kind of fantasy novel that I secretly loved. It was my favorite thing to do– eat and read. The world just shut up for a while.

That night I think we were trying to fight against death, against boredom and banality, against everything that made us cry and stare at our futures full in the face with dread. We drank and played games to be in the now, to be in each moment as hard as we could, because the moment was all that mattered, at the end of it all. I remember I felt intoxicated on life and darkness. I felt powerful. It was the most natural thing in the world. This was why we were alive– to be powerful and free.

I remember only images, snapshots burned into me, bleeding into each other until I no longer knew the order in which they had happen.

Everyone said they were witches. I desperately wanted to believe it.

People like us were born to change the world. It’s filled with shit. It’s filled with people who did the things they did to you. It’s filled with stupid pointlessness and ignorance and so much mundanity, it makes me want to scream. Don’t you feel it too?

The world out there is nothing more than a load of places with people in ’em. And the people out there are neither more interesting, nor better, nor lower, than us here in Angle Tar. It’s humans, Rue. We’re the same wherever you go, no matter what we surround ourselves with.

She ran from the shame, slammed his door behind her and ran, away from the pain and the moment when he had been so close to her mouth he could have kissed her, the thought that made her feel like her heart would burst.