He speaks on, words washing over me, the way that sunlight skips over the surface of water and filters into the depths below, lighting up the darkness. I keep my eyes closed. Amazingly, I can still see the stars: whole galaxies blooming from nothing – pink and purple suns, vast silver oceans, a thousand white moons.
The inside jokes weren’t inside jokes anymore. They had become stories. Nobody brought up the bad names or the bad times. And nobody felt sad as long as we could postpone tomorrow with more nostalgia.
Grief is like sinking, like being buried. I am in water the tawny color of kicked-up dirt. Every breath is full of choking. There is nothing to hold on to, no sides, no way to claw myself up. There is nothing to do but let go. Let go. Feel the weight all around you, feel the squeezing of your lungs, the slow, low pressure. Let yourself go deeper. There is nothing but bottom. There is nothing but the taste of metal, and the echoes of old things, and days that look like darkness.
Magnetism, my chem teacher would call it. The seeking for a thing of its pair.
He makes me feel like music.
That is the girl I was then: stumbling, sinking, lost in brightness and space. My past had been wiped clean, bleached a stark and spotless white. But you can build a future out of anything. A scrap, a flicker. The desire to go forward, slowly, one foot at a time. You can build an airy city out of ruins.
She always imagined their voices entangled somewhere in the wires when they spoke, caught up in a grid she didn’t fully understand, passing back and forth. Once the calls were disconnected, she imagined the echoes of old conversations would be trapped there, floating back and forth with no exit, like ghosts.
I let her stay a few feet ahead of me and try to memorize her exactly as she is: running, laughing, tan and happy and beautiful and mine; blond hair flashing in the last rays of sun like a torch, like a beacon of good things to come, and better days ahead for us both.
That’s what heartbreak feels like: a little death” -Brynn.
No one had ever told her this basic fact: not everyone got to be loved. It was like those stupid bell curves they’d had to study in math class. There was the big, swollen, happy middle, a whale lump full of blissful couples and families eating around a big dining room table and laughing. And then, at the tapered ends, there were the abnormal people, the weirdos and freaks, and zeros like her.
We don’t talk about that. We don’t talk about the fact that we can never hang out at Elody’s house after five o’clock because her mother will be home, and drunk. We don’t talk about the fact that Ally never eats more than a quarter of what’s on her plate, even though she’s obsessed with cooking and watches the Food Network for hours on end.
So we’re different. Who cares? We chose to escape together. We chose to stay together. We chose each other, didn’t we?
The air is still and freezing cold. The sky is a perfect, pale blue. The sun has just risen, weak and watery-looking, like it has just spilled itself over the horizon and it’s too lazy to clean itself up.
I have Lena back again, but she is changed, and it seems that every day she grows a little more different, a little more distant, as though I am watching her walk down a darkening hallway.
Amazingly, I can still see the stars: whole galaxies blooming from nothing – pink and purple suns, vast silver oceans, a thousand white moons.
She’d also learned that curiosity lead to disappointment: that it was better not to want, not to look, not to wonder.
And yet there were times when I felt my life full of such richness, such fullness, I couldn’t express it, couldn’t speak or breathe a word because I feared the disruption – even a single breath could ruin it, like wind over a pond. I didn’t want even a ripple.
When I can no longer go forward, even by an inch, I lay my head on the ground and wait to die. I’m too tired to be frightened. Above me is blackness, and all around me is blackness, and the forest sounds are a symphony to sing me out of this world. I am already at my funeral.
I feel as though I’m in a dream, where strange things are happening but they don’t feel strange. Everything is cloudy – everything is wrapped in a fog – and I’m filled from head to toe with the single, burning desire to get closer to the music, to hear the music better, for the music to go on and on and on.
Tonight the man in the moon looks as though he’s winking, or smirking: a moon with secrets.