Is this freedom? Is it happiness? I don’t know. I don’t care anymore. It is different – it is being alive.
And when we are with Alex, I might as well not be there. They speak in a language of whispers and giggles and secrets; their words are like a fairy-tale tangle of thorns, which place a wall between us.
It’s amazing how close I have been, all this time, to my old life. And yet the distance that divides me from it is vast.
Nobody ever said life was fair.
That’s when you realize that most of it-life, the relentless mechanism of existing-isn’t about you. It doesn’t include you at all. It will thrust onward even after you’ve jumped the edge. Even after you’re dead.
This is what hatred is. It will feed you and at the same time turn you to rot.
For the first time in a long time, I actually look at her. I’ve always thought Lena was pretty, but now it occurs to me that at some point – last summer? last year? – she became beautiful.
There is only what you want and what happens. There is only grabbing on and holding tight in the darkness.
All this time, I thought we were growing apart because I was leaving Lena behind. But really it was the reverse. She was learning to lie. She was learning to love.
Live free or die. Four words. Thirteen letters. Ridges, bumps, swirls under my fingertips. Another story. We cling tightly to it, and our belief turns it to truth.
Chance. Stupid, dumb, blind chance. Just a part of the strange mechanism of the world, with its fits and coughs and starts and random collisions.
The worst is knowing I can’t tell anybody what’s happening -or what’s happened- to me. Not even my mom.
In a world without love, this is what people are to each other: values, benefits, and liabilities, numbers and data. We weigh, we quantify, we measure, and the soul is ground to dust.
The priests and the scientists are right about one thing: At our heart, at our base, we are no better than animals.
My heart is fluid and soaring. There’s no longer any space between heartbeats.
And for a moment – for a split second – everything else falls away, the whole pattern and order of my life, and a huge joy crests in my chest. I am no one, and I owe nothing to anybody, and my life is my own.
Sometimes I feel as though there are two me’s, one coasting directly on top of the other: the superficial me, who nods when she’s supposed to nod and says what she’s supposed to say, and some other, deeper part, the part that worries and dreams... Most of the time they move along in sync and I hardly notice the split, but sometimes it feels as though I’m two whole different people and I could rip apart at any second.
I’ve never really thought about it before, but it’s a miracle how many kinds of light there are in the world, how many skies: the pale brightness of spring, when it feels like the hole world’s blushing; the lush, bright boldness of a July noon; purple storm skies and a green queasiness just before lightning strikes and crazy multicolored sunsets that look like someone’s acid trip.
We stand there for a moment, looking at each other, and in that instant I feel our connection so strongly it’s as though it achieves physical existence, becomes a hand all around us, cupping us together, protecting us. This is what people are always talking about when they talk about god: this feeling, of being held and understood and protected. feeling this way seems about as close to saying a prayer as you could get...
Everyone you trust, everyone you think you can count on, will eventually disappoint you. When left to their own devices, people lie and keep secrets and change and disappear, some behind a different face or personality, some behind early morning fog, beyond a cliff. That’s why the cure is so important. That’s why we need it.