I remember my brother sobbing in our mom’s embrace, and my ghostlike sadness, tears I mimicked but didn't comprehend, because I hadn’t yet learned that life gone never comes back.
-- Victoria Blanco (chapter 1)

Importance: A young boy, a friend of Victoria’s brother, dove off a bridge into the Rio Grande. The river there was shallow, and the friend broke his neck and died. Victoria was young and did not understand the literal death of this person. The quote is also metaphorical for the Rio Grande River as its water level drops from climate change and diversions through irrigation causing life and ways of life to disappear.

I am a woman like the woman before me, legs spread indecently, straddling worlds, caught between cities and countries and continents.”
-- Jamila Osman (chapter 2)

Importance: Osman is on a trip with her parents from Portland, Oregon to Edmonton, Alberta. On the unincorporated land between the United States and Canada...