Sunburn: Exclusive American Edition with Additional Material

by Chloe Michelle Howarth

It’s humiliating to wonder if I have ever meant the same things to her as she does to me.

I fear that Crossmore is too deep in me, and I would not know how to exist elsewhere.

Perhaps everyone else feels foreign in their hometown too. Yes, perhaps we are all just islands, as wild and merciless as each other, separated by our countless defects.

inwardly, I hope, everybody has as many private crises as I do.

Susannah is a beam of the sun; we can’t look directly at her.

would drape my own soul over her body to protect her from eyes like mine.

She has put herself at the centre of my attention, she has taken control of my emotions, and I feel her thrashing around within me, so intensely. I pray she will never go.

she does not need me the way that I need her.

I am afraid that we might all be our mothers’ daughters.

My patience for things unsaid has grown very thin, I don’t see the romance in it anymore.

The looming sky tells me that I will never be as ordinary as Mother needs, and I will never be as extraordinary as Susannah deserves. Let the rain come, let me be cleansed. Let me disappear into the fields and rise up and start again. Why can I not start again?

The sun is going down. I am running out of time. Very soon, I will have to decide whether I am brave enough to be with her. To be with her is a sin, to be without her is a tragedy.