stars in your multitudes

"Does it feel like flesh, Matthew? Because to me, it does no longer. This world, the world where I carve a place for myself, the world of men, it would turn on me, tear my flesh from my bones and feed me to the crows. And so each step I have taken, I have hardened myself, each step, every day, the creep of it unrelenting until, one morning, I touch myself and wonder if I am not, after all, become stone."