I don’t know whether these feelings – this thing growing inside of me – is something horrible and sick or the best thing that’s ever happened to me. Either way, I can’t stop it. I’ve lost control. And the truly sick thing is that despite everything, I’m glad.
It’s us against them, three against countless thousands. But for some reason, and even though it’s absurd, at that moment I feel pretty damn good about our odds.
She knew, now, that there was always light – beyond the dark, and the fear, out of the depths; there was sun to reach for, and air and space and freedom. There was always a way up, and out, and no need to be afraid.
As soon as I look up, his eyes click onto my face. The breath whooshes out of my body and everything freezes for a second, as though I’m looking at him through my camera lens, zoomed in all the way, the world pausing for that tiny span of time between the opening and closing of the shutter.
There’s a place for everything and everyone, you know. That is the mistake they make above. They think that only certain people have a place. Only certain kinds of people belong. The rest is waste. But even waste must have a place. Otherwise it will clog and clot, and rot and fester.
I loved to be alone in the woods, especially in the late fall when everything is crisp and golden, the leaves the color of fire, and it smells like things turning into earth. I loved the silence – the only sound the steady drum of the hooves and the horse’s breathing.
No guy in his right mind would ever choose me when there are people like Hana in the world: It would be like settling for a stale cookie when what you really want is a big bowl of ice cream, whipped cream and cherries and chocolate sprinkles included.
His eyes are blazing with light, more light than all the lights in every city in the whole world, more light than we could ever invent if we had ten thousand billion years.
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 cold things, and days that look like darkness.
It was a bird. A bird struggling through stickiness: a bird coated in paint, floundering in its nest, splashing color everywhere. Red. Red. Red. Dozens of them: black feathers coated thickly with crimson-colored paint, fluttering among the branches. Red means run.
I wish I could close my eyes and be blown into dust and nothingness, feel all my thoughts disperse like dandelion fluff drifting off on the wind.
As we’re standing there I realize we’re almost exactly the same height. We must look like the dark and light side of an Oreo cookie, and I think how just as easily it could have been the other way around. She could be blocking my path; I could be trying to slip around her into the dark.
People need other people to feel things for them,” she said. “It gets lonely to feel things all by yourself.
I’m mesmerized by the way his fingers move confidently along her skin, as though her body is his to reat and touch and tend to. She was mine before she was yours: The words are there, unexpectedly, surging from my throat to my tongue. I swallow them back.
If you’re ever wishing for things to go back to the way they were. You just have to look up.
They say that just before you die your whole life flashes before your eyes, but that’s not how it happened for me.
I wonder if it’s ever really possible to know the truth about someone else, or if the best we can do is just stumble into each other, heads down, hoping to avoid collision.
The past is nothing but a weight. It will build inside of you like a stone. If you hear the past speaking to you, feel it tugging at your back and running its fingers up your spine, the best thing to do is run.
But all you see is the crap. So you don’t have to believe in anything. So you’ll have an excuse to fail.
I wonder if this is how people get close: They heal each other’s wounds.