Did I love having my will sapped from the bite of crawling parasites that might bite me again? Actually, I did. I was in the Vortex, and I loved it. Not the one that sucks you into a town and holds you there, but another kind, the spin cycle of life. To outsiders, things may have seemed out of control; from here inside my head, everything reduced to a single simple directive: Keep going. The white blazes, hand painted and unique as snowflakes, were the only consistent and stable thing in a mad, swirling chaos. Everything I needed to survive—in the most real sense of that word—was on my back.
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