such dreamy desolation. forty women imprisoned under a stark grey sky that may or may not be their own, squabbling over the best techniques of boiling potatoes, stealing sustenance from mass graves and bits of joy from their barren days. forty women leaving behind one empty cage, two empty villages and the Child who wasn't really a child. when she — the fortieth prisoner brimming with hope and determination, the only one of the women who dared to stake claim over the relentless wasteland — finally reached a state of acceptance about the hopelessness of her own condition and lay herself down to rest, i felt a shard of her grief, the grief of the innumerable seemingly pointless prisoners, pierce my own heart. are humans human only when we have another human to share our humanity with? is time time only when we have a tool by which to measure it? is a woman a woman only through the presence of men? divorced of context, it seems all our social constructs must crumble. what are we, then, without our history?