I close my eyes. An image flashes – emerging from the van with Julian after our escape from New York City; believing, in that moment, that we had escaped the worst, that life would begin again for us. Instead life has only grown harder.
Mistake, mistake, mistake. A strange word: stinging, somehow.
But now I give in, let the anger surge. I’m sick of people acting like this world, this other world is the normal one, while I’m the freak. It’s not fair; like all the rules have suddenly changed and somebody forgot to tell me.
Someday she will be saved, and the past and all its pain will be rendered as smoothly palatable as the food we spoon to our babies.
Time and space recede and blast away like a universe expanding forever outward, and leaving only darkness and the two of us on its periphery, darkness and breathing and touch.
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.