"You're very funny," Aliyah drawled sarcastically, finally taking a seat beside the statue she was working on, though she remained with her back carefully turned to him until she was finished eating. "I don't pretend I live a luxurious life here, but I live a life as well as anyone else, and it is plenty enough for me." The woman's hands started feeling the statue again, and she analyzed it carefully, like she was looking for something specific. "You wish to know the truth, and the truth is that I would love the opportunity to go somewhere else and take a risk, and if I succeeded or not, I doubt, as my own entity, I would be in any less of a place than I am now. With honesty, I've wished to go many places. I've thought endlessly about how far I could go, how much I could see, and how well a life I could make out there." Her fingers fiddled with the mountain base, and she began to pick flecks of sand off here and there. "But there's someone else I want to give happiness to, and if I run somewhere else to try something different and then fail...what could happen? If I was not surviving, if I was not at least making something here, I would take the risk with open arms, but like this I'm at least crawling towards getting him back. But if I go out there, what if I end up barreling backwards too far away from the starting line to ever catch up?"