“I felt like a spy. The camera had caught them in the middle of a smile, in the middle of the day, in the middle of their lives. They were looking into the lens for each other and themselves. Could they have imagined that a girl like me, hungry and feverish, would drink in the details of their privacy, so many years after they were gone? I knew how it had ended for them. but I wanted not to know because they didn't know it themselves. It made the pictures so sad. I felt like some dwarfed and fallen god who could create nothing and change nothing, but could predict their fate with cruel certainty. I could point to each of them and say, You will die of consumption in your twenty-ninth year. You will marry a man you do not love and never have children. You will drink yourself insane. You will live well into your nineties and neither of your daughters will forgive you -- you will die alone. The sorrows that were set to happen to them had already happened. I knew what was coming, and like a train wreck that couldn't be stopped, I wanted to cover my eyes so I wouldn't see the smoke and the burning.”

Color is the Suffering of Light, Melissa Green