Ally Condie

I draw in a ragged breath, the kind you take when the pain is too deep to cry, when you can't cry because all you are is pain, and if you let some of it out, you might cease to exist.

There is so much want. I feel it so much that I am water, a river of want, pooled in the shape of a girl named Cassia.

People can be miracles.

at first when the rain fell from the sky so wide and deepit smelled like sage, my favorite smellI went up on the plateau to watch it cometo see the gifts it always broughtbut this rain changed from blue to black and leftnothing.

The rain turns lighter, turns to snow. And I have a sense that we have not yet arrived, that we are still reaching. For each other. For who we are meant to be.

I'm so

Once you want something, everything changes. Now I want everything. I feel it so much that I am water, a river of want,pooled in the shape of a girl.

And it is strange that absence can feel like presence.

It dances on the air for a moment before it falls, too. A fresh gust of wind almost saves it, but a worker catches sight of it and lifts a tube up to suck the paper from the air, to suck the words from the sky.I'm sorry, Grandfather.

The Society wants us to be afraid of dying. But I'm not. I'm only afraid of dying wrong.

Blue is the most common eye color in Oria Province, but there is something different about his eyes and I'm not sure what it is. More depth? I wonder what he sees when he looks at me. If he seems to have depth to me, do I seem shallow and transparent to him?

Any other questions?""Just one," I say. "What color are your eyes?" I want to know what he thinks, how he sees himself - the real Ky - when he dares to look."Blue," he says sounding surprised, "they've always been blue.""Not to me.""What do they look like to you?" he says puzzled, amused. Not looking at my mouth anymore, looking into my eyes."Lots of colors," I say. "At first I thought they were brown. Once I thought they were green...""What are they now?" he asks. He widens his eyes a little, leans closer, lets me look as long and deep as I want."Well?""Everything," I tell him, "They're everything.

I have tried to be righteous all my life. Yet I have never been content.

So I fight. I fight the only way I know, with thinking of Ky, even thought the pain of missing him is so strong I can hardly stand it... I think of him, I think of him, I think of him.

I don't know what happens after we die. It doesn't seem to me like there can be much past this. But I suppose I can conceive that what we make and do can last beyond us. Maybe in a different place, on another plane.

He watches the sun out of the world and the stars into it and sometimes I wonder if he watches the sun come up again. Is it hard to sleep when you know you are almost at the end? Do you not want to miss a moment, even those that would otherwise seem dull and unremarkable?

They could not write their names, but I can write mine, and I will again, somewhere where it will last for a long, long time. I will find Ky, and then I will find that place.

I keep telling myself that, and most of the time I believe it.