Don’t move, Anna Reiley. Right now, everything is perfect.
How can you say it was all a lie?” I ask, just above a whisper. “Matt was my best friend. I loved him that way always. ‘We have to look out for her.’ That was the last thing he said to me alone. And then he died. What was I supposed to do, Frank? Tell me?
It was just over a year ago. Twelve months, nine days and six hours ago, actually. But thirteen months ago everything was... perfect.
But death isn’t an ending, Elyse. Just part of a longer journey. Death begets life, remember. One does not exist without the other.
Crying never brought anything back from the dead. It only felt like the ocean trying to drown you from the inside out.
When I stood naked before him, I felt powerful, alive. Adored.
His gaze was far away, adrift on another sea, and his real smile wasn’t for me. The girl who’d written volumes on the walls but never said a word.
I tried desperately to grab on to the moment, to the feeling, to hold it in my heart. But beauty is by its very nature elusive, slippery. A fragment, a flash. Here and gone again.
One month. That’s how long it took before I really freaked out. I was so angry, so filled with rage. But when my body tried to scream, I felt only pain. Emptiness. A raw, tearing ache, again and again and again.
Nature: it’s own creation, it’s own mystery, existing long before we took our first breaths and long after we take our last.
That was the thing about pictures. No matter how beautiful, they couldn’t capture the truly felt parts of a moment. Life was different looking through the lens, the colors less vibrant, the beauty less grand. By the time you took the shot, the moment had already passed.
Pictures couldn’t tell the whole story anyway. That was the other thing about them – they were always a carefully edited glimpse, a story out of context.
Science: a construct created by man to explain away all of life’s mysteries. Nature: it’s own creation, it’s own mystery, existing long before we took our first breaths and long after we take our last.
Sometimes a tarnished life was worse than a swift death.
Don’t settle for stuff. That’s pretty much the only thing I learned in life. You see something, some chance for something great, you take it. You grab your keys and jump on your bike and go, no regrets.
For a girl who’s been burned before, risking it all is easier said than done.
Despite my ability to read people, I felt like an outsider, like someone watching a party from the other side of the glass. I could see these things unfold, but I couldn’t quite understand the dynamics, the deep knowing that comes from growing up with people you care about.
No matter where on the globe you went, something was always changing.
Right here, right now, for the first time since I’d lost my voice, I let it all go.
In my time at the Cove, I’d spent many nights scribbling in my journal, attempting to write my way into a solution, into some kind of clarity and acceptance about what I’d lost and where I’d go from here. But maybe clarity was like love, shooting through you when you least expected it, when you’d finally stopped seeking it.
They tear each other apart. Sometimes there aren’t any happy endings or logical explanations and we just have to accept that and move on. Sometimes it really is that simple.