perfection is the highest order of self abuse

"My mother once wrote a poem about rivers. They were women, she wrote. Starting out small grls, tiny streams decorated with wild flowers. Then they were torrents, gouging paths through sheer granite, flinging themselves off cliffs, fearless and irrisistable. Later they grew fat and serviceable, broad slow curves carrying commerce and sewage. But in their unconscious depths, catfish gorged. Grew the size of barges. And in the hundred-year storms, they rose up, forgetting the promises they made, the wedding vows, and drowned everything for miles around.  Finally they gave out, birth-emptied, malarial, into a fan of swamp that met the sea.
But this river was none of these things. It flowed serene and ignored, past spray painted fences and brick walls, alive despite everything, gaurding the secrets of survival. this river was a girl like me."

-Janet Fitch