More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
You’re not going bowling here, you know that, right? You’re not going to get a pint of Ben and Jerry’s anytime you feel like it. Can I get a beer if I feel like it? Well, yeah. You can always get a beer. But otherwise, there’s nothing. He’d meant all of this to caution her, maybe even to change her mind, but they hadn’t seen each other in so long. Alma thought he must have forgotten who she was. Nothing was exactly what she was looking for, and she had no intention of ever going back.
She was more than happy to be cold and wet and windswept, so long as there was quiet and space. 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.
“When we were kids, we used to climb up there,” Theo said. “Well, the stupid kids did anyway,” Emerson said. “That’s offensive,” Theo shot back. “It was obviously the brave ones who did.”
He thought, instead, of the mountain and its cloud-hidden, windbeaten tower. They stood as a reminder to him that there were things in this world that were steady, that lasted, even if they had broken down in the process.
He had told her once that his only real interest in the world was absorbing as much of it as he could without having to travel too far. It was astonishing, he’d said, how vast one’s small world turned out to be when you explored every corner of it.
I could see the wound in her when she woke and found him gone. This gaping hole that she’d always had and that she’d tried to fill with fragile, impermanent things. Things that moved in and out with the tides.
