Live free or die.
Alex is dead, do you hear me? All of that-what we felt, what it meant- that’s done now, okay? Buried. Blown away.
In one of the tents, Julian is sleeping. And in another: Alex.
That’s what time does: We stand stubbornly like rocks while it flows all around us, believing that we are immutable – and all the time we’re being carved, and shaped, and whittled away.
But this isn’t like anything I’ve ever seen, or imagined, or even dreamed: This is like music or dancing but better than both.
Like I’ve been sketched by an amateur artist: if you don’t look too closely, it’s all right, but start focusing and all the smudges and mistakes become really obvious.
I still wanted to know why. As though somebody was going to answer that for me, as though any answer would be satisfying.
Some things are better left buried and forgotten.
It was as though the darkness was a sheet of raw cookie dough and someone had just taken a cookie cutter and made a child-sized shape out of it.
You don’t reach points in life at which everything is sorted out for us. I believe in endings that should suggest our stories always continue.
A string of bright white buildinh, glistening like teeth over the slurping mouth of the ocean.
The salt blowing off the sea makes the air feel textured and heavy.
It’s the way he says my name: like music.
That’s all I want. Just you and me. Always.
He who leaps for the sky may fall, it’s true. But he may also fly.
This is pretty much the answer to every problem you encounter in suburbia: plant a tree, and hope you don’t see anyone’s privates.
I start to back away before I do something wildly inappropriate, like jump on top of him.
In my head I try and reach back, through the fence, past the smoke; I try and grab his hand and pull. Alex, come back. There is nothing to do but sink. The hours close around me, encase me completely, like a tomb.
That is the strangest thing about the world: how it looks so different from every point of view.
My first kiss. A new kind of kiss, like the new kind of music still playing, softly, in the distance – wild and arrhythmic, desperate. Passionate.