“We looked at each other, and burst out laughing. You began to run.  I ran behind you. By this point we were laughing and running, embarrassed, amused, relieved. And we ran, far enough from the bouncer and the square and our boring conversations and orderly vertical lines. We ran from the pills and Mother Bar, the men we had hated and who had hurt us so badly we had to hurt others back, and from the queues of chaos and the dirty streets, the vibrating dancefloors and our parents and our drinking. You ran to Oz, I ran to Greece, and we knew we had made it, deliberately healthy in our beautiful distant stillness.”

from the short story, “Mother Bar,” by Christina Michael