I sat in one of the backseats in Mychal's minivan and as he drove south on Michigan Road, Daisy started playing one of our favorite song, "You're the One." Mychal was laughing as Daisy and I screamed the lyrics to each other. She sang lead, and I belted out the background voice that just repeated, "You're everything, everything, everything," and I felt like I was. You're both the fire and the water that extinguishes it. You're the narrator, the protagonist, and the sidekick. You're the storyteller and the story told. You are somebody's something, but you are also your you.
—Aza
"Imagine you're trying to find someone, or even you're trying to find yourself, but you have no senses, no way to know where the walls are, which way is forward or backward, what is water and what is air. You're senseless and shapeless--you feel like you can only describe what you are by identifying what you're not, and you're floating around in a body with no control. You don't get to decide who you like or where you live or when you eat or what you fear. You're just stuck in there, totally alone, in this darkness. That's scary. This," I said, and turned on the flashlight. "This is control. This is power. There may be rats and spiders and whatever the hell. But we shine the light on them, not the other way around. We know where the walls are, which way is in and which way is out. This," i said, turning off my light again, "is what I feel like when I'm scared. This"—I turned the flashlight back on—is a walk in the fucking park."
We walked for a while in silence. "It's that bad?" she asked finally.
"Sometimes," I said.
"But then your flashlight starts working again," she said.
"So far."
— Aza and Daisy
