Excerpt from Pictures

“Picture a triumphant surrender or an honorable death. Picture a blooded two-fold thread spun around your neck, with the past pulling back, the future pulling forward and the present eventually decapitated. Picture the human heart shredded into infinitely small pieces, set ablaze and blown into withering ashes; ashes that could fill the universe and suffocate all its stars. Picture the painting of love and art, the one you secretly entitled ‘Courage’ in the diary you never wrote. Picture beauty and goodness until you can’t picture anything anymore. Picture anything not because reality is far from picture-perfect but because your perception of it is polished in the gutter of the fallen — teardrops and raindrops.”