They don’t tell a woman that she can choose things that aren’t small. They don’t tell her that small stones get lost. They slip through the holes in your pocket. Or that if they get lost, you can’t choose new ones. That lost stones are lost forever. Throw out your heart, too, into the road, amid the mud and the brambles. Throw out your joy. Throw out your soul and hugs and kisses and your marriage bed. You must, you must. And now get up and look at yourself on this morning, so thin and so blue. Go down to the kitchen, and put food inside your mouth, and put it inside the children’s mouths, and inside the old man’s mouth, then inside the mouths of the cows and the calves and the sow and the hens and the dog. You must, you must. Until you forget everything else, with all those musts.
— Irene Solà, When I Sing, Mountains Dance (trans. Mara Faye Lethem)