All the Colors of the Dark

So many gone and never found and no one ever charged. […] The girls outnumbered the boys fifty to one. They varied in appearance but were one and the same. Young. Mostly too young to realize they were birthmarked with targets that only boldened with time, invisible to begin with, taking shape though formative years and burning red hot through puberty and into their teens.

Grief is a part of life. It’s the unknown that truly ruins us.

Saint wanted to ask what it was like, to lose the thing that defined you. But perhaps she knew: it left you someone else. A stranger you had no chose but to tolerate, and see each day and feel and fear. […] I want everything to mean something, to lead somewhere.

[…] that death when it came was not light or confession, forgiveness or peace or fire. It was that cold piece of time before you were born, that glance into history books that told you the world went on before and would go on again, no matter who was there to witness it.