She knew the difference between fact and fiction, but she couldn’t abandon her love stories.
I think, as this war goes on, we will all have to look more deeply. These questions are not about them, but about us.
Leni felt distance spreading between them. That was how change came, she supposed: in the quiet of things unspoken and truths unacknowledged.
Everyone up here had two stories : the life before and the life now. If you wanted to pray to a weirdo god or live in a school bus or marry a goose, no one in Alaska was going to say crap to you. No one cared if you had an old car on your deck, let alone a rusted fridge. Any Life that could be imagined could be lived up here.
Mama had quit high school and “lived on love.” That was how she always put it, the fairy tale. Now Leni was old enough to know that like all fairy tales, theirs was filled with thickets and dark places and broken dreams, and runaway girls.
Books are the mile markers of my life. Some people have family photos or home movies to record their past. I’ve got books. Characters. For as long as I can remember, books have been my safe place. I read about places I can barely imagine and lose myself in journeys to foreign lands to save girls who didn’t know they were really princesses.
He leans close and kisses each of my cheeks, whispering, “I loved her all of my life,” as he draws back.
How can I possibly sleep at a time like this?” He sighed. “You will learn that a lot of things are possible.
She was crying for it all at last – for the pain and loss and fear and anger, for the war and what it had done to her and to all of them, for the knowledge of evil she could never shake, for the horror of where she’d been and what she’d done to survive.
You will learn that a lot of things are possible.
She whispered in his ear. “Tell my sister I asked about her. We parted badly.” He smiled. “I am constantly arguing with my brother, even in war. In the end, we’re brothers.
But now it is time to look ahead, not behind.
Their kiss was sad, an apology almost, a reminder of what they’d once shared.
It’s like his back is broken, Mama had said, and you don’t stop loving a person when they’re hurt. You get stronger so they can lean on you. He needs me. Us.
Alaska didn’t create character; it revealed it.
In time, his grief had turned to anger and then drifted toward sorrow, and now, finally, it had settled into a lingering sadness that was a part of him, not the whole.
Every choice changed the road you were on and it was too easy to end up going in the wrong direction. Sometimes, settling down.
Samwise Gamgee would never leave Frodo like this. No hero would ever do this. But books were only a reflection of real life, not the thing itself.
In literature, death was many things – a message, catharsis, retribution. There were deaths that came from a beating heart that stopped and deaths of another kind, a choice made, like Frodo going to the Grey Havens. Death made you cry, filled you with sadness, but in the best of her books, there was peace, too, satisfaction, a sense of the story ending as it should. In real life, she saw, it wasn’t like that. It was sadness opening up inside of you, changing how you saw the world.
She was wiser than she’d been before. Now she knew how fragile life and love were. Maybe she would love him for only this day, or maybe for only the next week, or maybe until she was an old, old woman. Maybe he would be the love of her life... or her love for the duration of this war... or maybe he would only be her first love. All she really knew was that in this terrible, frightening world, she had stumbled into something unexpected. And she would not let it go again.