I feel hollow inside, as if there’s a black hole where my heart was, as if I am caving in around myself.
I had nothing to prove and everything to lose. But it didn’t take love to sacrifice something of yourself for someone else. It just took desperation.
And it is everything I have longed for, and everything that breaks my heart.
I guess when someone’s gone from your life for a while, all you think about are the big things. The big regrets, the could-have, should-haves. Or the big moments, the memories that are going to be with you forever, those life-changing moments, like first kisses and first confessions and first trusts. And you think about the lasts too: the last kiss, the last words, the last moments.
What if eternity is nothing more than me, alone, in the darkness?
But of course these are scientists. Tell them to leave something alone, and all they want to do is poke it with a stick.
I shut my eyes, and I force myself to feel myself. You never really think of what it’s like to be in your body, but even with my eyes shut, I can feel the boundaries of my skin, real or not. Everything that’s me is contained inside this body, and I feel it all. The heartbeat I cannot control. The mind that may not be mine. I am here, in this moment, in this body. All that I am – maybe not all that I ever was, but all that I currently am – is right here.
When you wake up, your face will be dry. But that doesn’t mean you didn’t cry.
You gonna fight for something, you fight for something that you’re willing to die for.
You never know. Something small and broken really can be powerful.
My heart stutters – not why? or how? – those are not the important questions. The really important question is: by whom?
Perhaps the only thing worse than fear is apathy. Fear makes us do horrible things to people. Apathy makes us allow horrible things to happen to them.
If you love someone – deeply, in as true a way as you can – you will get hurt. People leave us and love falls apart, and when it does, it hurts. It should hurt. How can you not hurt when what you love is gone?
But, really, grief left a hole in you, and while you healed around the hole, you never didn’t have it. A piece of you was gone. You couldn’t heal something that wasn’t there.
Besides,” he says, “every hero I know is soaked in blood.
The silence in our house now is born from the need for intense concentration, as we all carefully step around the truth we wish we didn’t know, the person we can’t help that Bo became, the future we’re all afraid is collapsing around us, falling as silent and cold and crushing as snow.
And I know what I told my father was true: let us taste the world, and we’ll do whatever it takes to shape it into our home.
Even when you’re silent, even when you block out all noise, you body is still a cacophony of life.
Don’t you understand? You are Elder. When you take my role as Eldest, you must dedicate your whole life to this one idea: you are the caretaker of every single person on the ship. They are your responsibility. You can never show weakness in front of them: you are their strength. You can never let them see you in despair: you are their hope. You must always be everything to everyone on board.
Because if I break, they’ll break too. It’s a responsibility I’d never really felt before, or at least I never thought about enough to name. But, Bo’s actions just cement my place in my family. He can walk away from the dinner table. I can’t.