lena-halloway

Raven looks at me. __hat about you, Lena?__ can feel Alex__ eyes on me. My mouth is so dry; the sun is so blinding. I look away, toward the hundreds and hundreds of people who have been driven out of their homes, out of their lives, to this place of dust and dirtiness, all because they wanted the power to feel, to think, to choose for themselves. They couldn__ have known that even this was a lie__hat we never really choose, not entirely. We are always being pushed and squeezed down one road or another. We have no choice but to step forward, and then step forward again, and then step forward again; suddenly we find ourselves on a road we haven__ chosen at all.But maybe happiness isn__ in the choosing. Maybe it__ in the fiction, in the pretending: that wherever we have ended up is where we intended to be all along.Coral shifts, and moves her hand to Alex__ arm.____ with Julian,_ I say at last. This, after all, is what I have chosen.