Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -… [943]

I have to write. I don’t know what else to do. The others are asleep now, but it isn’t dark. I’m on watch because I couldn’t sleep if I tried. I’m jittery and crazed. I can’t cry. I want to get up and just run and run… Run away from everything. But there isn’t any away. — , Octavia E. Butler - Earthseed, Book 1 -…, 943

Note

The staccato accumulation of short declaratives enacts the jitter it describes — the prose cannot settle any more than Lauren can. The ellipsis after ‘run and run’ performs the trailing-off of a mind that can’t finish a thought, and the final four-word turn (‘But there isn’t any away’) collapses escape into a logical impossibility rather than a moral one. ‘Away’ is treated as a place, and denied existence.