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It was a good place to be sad, and sadness was what she’d expected. She settled in, let it roll into her like ocean waves into an empty shell, soaking her heart in salt water that burned and soothed all at once.
The radio waves, they’re like the moisture in the air. They seep into your clothing and hair, and they stick.
A cello like the sighing of a whale. A bow against fiddle strings like a cawing seabird. The steady beat of a drum like the flapping of wings or the thumping of fish tails in a bucket.
As she parted branches and ducked under boughs, the violet flower stood out like a stray brushstroke against the deep green.
She thought she heard the rhythmic sound of someone speaking, but it was just the waves outside. In and out, in and out. Always present, yet never the voice she was hoping to hear.
She was almost back to the beach when the sky darkened, the clouds turning a gray tinted with green.
Love the patina sky
The sky above the water, the water around and below her. It was whiter than white—she was surrounded by an iridescent, impossible brightness.
Love the book title in the body of the book.
And now, all those moments were gone, Lucie’s story seemingly forgotten along with her. It was, if anything could be, worse than being dead.
Ohmygosh
Hayden had spent a lifetime earning his immortality. But that did not mean he would let go easily.
Her knowledge of the world and its circumstances seemed to probe further into the future than his, as if she pieced together the components of the present with such speed that she could foretell the most obvious of outcomes. Her dependence on the world was so minuscule—even her love for Oren and his love for her—that whatever she saw was neither good nor bad, desired nor undesired, welcome nor unwelcome. She would not miss him when he was gone.
Glass glittered on the pavement like stars that had lost their way.
Usually, he imagined fish dreaming with their eyes open, seabirds asleep in their cliffside burrows.
Life should be much simpler than all that. As simple as fish and crabs and sea otters. As simple as clams tumbling across the seafloor and giant whales rocking to sleep on vast black tides. This was the only solace he ever had—that it would all go on with or without him.
“Names are important. They give things significance. How do we talk about something without the damn words for it?”
“Do you believe in an afterlife?” “I believe in monuments,” she said. “Monuments to who we were, something left behind. Maybe it’s a canoe floating on the water. Maybe it’s as simple as that.”
As you somersaulted toward the earth, you caught sight of the ocean lit by the rising sun. It was such an impossible brightness that you thought you were glimpsing heaven. It was then that you changed course and decided you hadn’t fallen at all—you had leapt.
They could be alone together, couldn’t they? They were like mountains. No one ever asked a mountain to do anything but be there, and a mountain never asked anything of anyone. You could be scared at the top of a peak, but the mountain would still be there under your feet, strong as ever. You could smile while standing on a mountain, and you didn’t have to have a reason.
On top of a giant, churning wave, a man rode a white horse. He was massive and mythical—his body turquoise, his long hair and beard white. He held a long tree-branch spear over his head.
How does one explain the absence of a memory, a gaping hole in life that has suddenly come back? Its impact could be felt in any number of ways, although it was becoming clear that they were mostly negative. “There’s nothing wrong with me,” Alma said, scrambling for the right thing to say and finally settling on the truth: “But I can’t explain it. I can only say that Lucie trusted me with her story. If you can, just try and see something good in all of it. You have her memory back.”
Thats a crazy thing to go and say
Passing the beach, she watched as the steps that led down through the rocks were crushed like bird bones and swept away.
“I read,” he said, “that often, when people get lost in the woods, they’ll come to a main road and they’ll just walk right across it. Or they’ll turn around and go right back where they started. People who’ve done this have said it was because they didn’t believe the road would take them in the right direction. But I tend to think it’s just easier sometimes to be lost.”
Lying in a bed with a man for the first time since being with Alex, she realized that she no longer felt desirable. But she no longer wished for something to happen that would prove to her, and maybe to him, that she had been, at one time, beautiful and lovable.
The boat began to shrink into the gilded sea,
She pulled a sweatshirt over her newly tattooed skin,
Id hate the feeling of pilled up old crewneck on my fresh back piece
The space between her shoulder blades felt like a smoldering fire, and it was hard to think or find words.
Its cuz she put a crewneck on like a psycho
It was astonishing, he’d said, how vast one’s small world turned out to be when you explored every corner of it.
I’d do what the whales do—at least the ones that don’t end up on a beach somewhere. I think I’d like that feeling—just one long fall into the abyss, drifting down, feeding the sharks and crabs. Then the snails. Worms burrowing into my bones. Transforming along the way into an actual habitat, feeding thousands of creatures and eventually just becoming new life.”
Can he pick a less despondent demise
