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She couldn’t be around people, but she couldn’t be in remote places either. It wedged her into a special kind of isolation—a kind that, she realized now, was the wrong kind.
When it comes down to it, we’re all just a culmination of experiences. And when we lose those, what do we have?
It is agonizing, the disposition of the human mind to construct obstacles in one’s own path, when the world itself has given us none.
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.
“There’s a time for everything to leave the present and become history. We play our part, and then we step the hell out of the way and let whoever comes next build on whatever artifacts we’ve left behind.” “What if they ruin it instead?” “Every once in a while someone will take responsibility for that history, make sure that doesn’t happen. I say this speaking directly to the little hope I do have in humanity.”
I wished I could say something to her, reassure her in some way that what she’d done had meant a lot. That her life had meant a lot. That people leave in the middle of a path sometimes, and we have to keep walking. That small things done with great love become great things.
We heard it, and we felt it, the pulse of a dying planet that had stories it could no longer tell on its own. It was beautiful and comforting, that rhythm—suffused with pieces of everyone and everything we had loved—but it was also broken.
