Heart-wrenching. I know stories like these, I’ve heard them and read them but, honestly, they are so far outside my reality that every one shocks me like the first. Makes me feel breathless and speechless, and guilty that there are people in this land who have these god-awful experiences, who live somehow to tell them, and I don’t know a single one of these souls personally. I become more and more cognizant that reality is subjective and fluid and intensely personal. And, those of us who cannot imagine such realities have an obligation to listen to these stories, to feel them and hold them and cry over them, to retell them so everyone knows, and then do what we can to make sure that fewer people have these stories to tell, until no one has these stories to tell. Until no one has these stories to tell. No one.