text: There was once a girl who loved the hills. She would stand barefooted on their peaks, letting the grass whip around her feet and the birds chirp inquisitively from the trees. Sometimes she would slide down their gentle slopes and rest in the shade produced by the blanket of leaves that blocked out the sun but not the sky. Other times she would climb the trees and pick an apple, each morsel of food giving her just a little more time before she had to return home. It wasn't her home, despite bearing that name. But each night, she was dragged back by the chains of blood and the weight of guilt. Her parents did not yell or scream or hit, but they stared. They stared at each other with fury in their eyes and hate in their hearts. The manufactured silence hung heavy in the house, and whenever the girl choked on it, her parents would turn to glare at her too. It was said that emotions made magic, and the girl dared not think what heavy magic was woven into her house, forged by hate and sorrow. And so, every morning the girl ran. She ran into her tiny legs could carry her no further, and then she stood on the peaks of the hills where the silence was did not force her to her knees, depriving her of any breath of happiness. In fact, the silence in the hills wasn't really silence at all. Instead, one could hear the chirping of the birds, the whistling of the wind, and the skittering of the squirrels. If one listened, that is. And the girl always listened. But as night fell and the girl's stomach started to rumble, the chains would once again force her back to her house, her family, her sadness. But her heart would stay in the hills, and when she closed her eyes at night she saw the twinkling stars instead of the run-down ceiling. When she breathed, she would taste the sweet air of the night instead of the stale silence she was actually breathing in. But only when she was alone. When she was with her parents, their glares would push her deeper and deeper into her chair, her heart yearning to be free from this place of sorrow. What the girl had heard was true: emotions did indeed weave magic. But what she did not understand was that the grief, the hate, and the anger that made up her life was not powerful. No, those emotions are far too common for that. They put tiny stitches in the tapestry of life, not quite making a difference. But longing? Longing is a very powerful type of magic indeed. It doesn't weave stitches into the present or the past, but it can change the future. And the future becomes the present before one can even blink an eye. And so, as the girl dat in the house at night and ran to the hills during the day, the magic woven by her yearning dissolved the chains of blood and did away with the guilt weighing her down. And with each day, the urge to stay in the hills got stronger. At first it was just a few minutes, lingering before she was inevitably drawn back to her house. Then, she started staying out for hours, laying on her back and watching the stars. Sometimes, she stayed out all night. As time went on, those nights became more and more frequent. One is always bound to something, and with the dissolution of one confine comes another. But not all confines are bad. Some are of your own choosing.