It’s the most unhappy people who want to stay alive, because they think they haven’t done everything they want to do.
How do you become someone with X-ray vision?
Maybe there’s a whole assortment of impossible people waiting for me to find them.
That’s when I broke down and cried, because I already knew the very best people. Finn was the very best person I knew.
Then, into the silence, over the top of everything, came a long, sad howl. For a second it felt like the sound had come from inside me. Like the world had taken everything I was feeling and turned it into a sound.
If things went my way, I would be working at a renaissance fair as a falconer. I wouldn’t have to worry about climbing career ladders or getting promotions, because falconry’s not like that. Either you’re a falconer or you’re not. Either the birds come back to you or they fly away. My father waited.
I want to imagine wrinkled time, and forests thick with wolves, and bleak midnight moors.
Either you’re a falconer or you’re not. Either the birds come back to you or they fly away.
You could just hold them, couldn’t you? You could sit close to them, nestle into them so you could hear the machine of them churning away. You could press your ear against that person’s back, listening to the rhythm of them, knowing that you were both made of the same exact stuff. You could do things like that.
Being a romantic means you always see what’s beautiful. What’s good. You don’t want to see the gritty truth of things. You believe everything will turn out right.
Maybe I was destined to forever fall in love with people I couldn’t have.
Places we went back to so many times that they started to.
Hm-hm-hm,” his laugh went. Like he’d swallowed the sun.
I sat on a bench and my mother stood in front of me, looking down the track. Her hair was cut short, and because it had all turned gray when she was twenty-three, she always had it dyed a deep chestnut brown. It was that color all over except for a super thin stripe at the top of her head, where the gray showed through. Sometimes I wanted to touch that place on my mother’s head, that thin crack where her real self had forced its way through.
It was like I was in a show about someone almost exactly like myself but not quite.
Last year she came into my room first thing in the morning with the saddest look on her face and told me that Finn was dead. She waited for me to wake up completely. She waited until her news sank right into the marrow of my bones. She seemed to be waiting for my reaction, waiting for me to break down or run over to her for support. But I was numb. I sat on my bed, frozen. She stood there awhile longer and then finally gave up. “April Fools,” she said, sounding disappointed.
But maybe she was right. Maybe it wasn’t that she could change my words; maybe it was that she was able to strip away all the layers until only the truth was left. Ugly and skinless and raw.
Sometimes I wondered if I might go through my whole life looking for someone who came even a little bit close.
What if buried under all those leaves is me? Not this me, but the girl in a Gunne Sax dress with the back zipper open. The girl with the best boots in the world. What if she’s under there? What if she’s crying? Because she will be, if I find her. Her tears tell the story of what she knows. That the past, present, and future are just one thing. That there’s nowhere to go from here. Home is home is home.
Until the last light faded. Until the space between the tree branches and the branches themselves became the same dark thing.