20:46 hrs – Chongqing, China by Finnegan Flawnt

We watched an old movie tonight, What a Wonderful Life, and we’re talking about what may come for us while we wait for Dun Che Lao Ren, the Christmas Old Man. All of us, the girls, who do not exist. I love the pretty faces, scrubbed, in clean blankets, sitting under paper lanterns and flowers. We hold hands, we sing ‘Rudolph the Red Nose Reindeer’ the way we know it. Everybody’s got a voice and even if you kill them you can’t take that voice away. Even the rain flowing down the gutter and on the street and from there into the Yangtze and into the sea, knows that. Our voice goes with the rain to the ocean and touches everyone else. And if they don’t hear us because we are little, they dream us.