The rain’s crying the tears I can’t quite shed. I’m too busy holding myself together. Yet beneath my prison of steely ribs my little child is weeping and trembling. I can keep locking her in her room, bribing her with numbing food, giving her a lecture on behaving like an adult. But how crazy is that? For she is my greatest heroine, the repository of my deepest feelings. I must build an altar to her, to her jeweled tears and open bleeding heart. She is both my tenderness and my strength.