Tell Me Your Secrets

I sit down at the coffee shop. There are only a few long, wide tables, and all the patrons gather around them like we're family, like we know each other.

I sit across from two older women, skin wrinkled by life and joy and sorrow and sunshine, women with fire in their words and eyes and fingers. They clink mugs, talk about their book club, their loved ones

and I want to scream at them,

"How do you do it? How have you survived this world all this time, a planet whose beauty and power is raped by...