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And no matter how desperate or dire, never pray to the gods that answer after dark.
She lied, but only because she can’t say her real name—one of the vicious little details tucked like nettles in the grass.
What is a person, if not the marks they leave behind? She has learned to step between the thorny weeds, but there are some cuts that cannot be avoided—a memory, a photograph, a name.
Because she has spent weeks getting to know him. And he has spent hours forgetting her.
March is such a fickle month. It is the seam between winter and spring—though seam suggests an even hem, and March is more like a rough line of stitches sewn by an unsteady hand, swinging wildly between January gusts and June greens. You don’t know what you’ll find, until you step outside.
“The old gods may be great, but they are neither kind nor merciful. They are fickle, unsteady as moonlight on water, or shadows in a storm. If you insist on calling them, take heed: be careful what you ask for, be willing to pay the price.” She leans over Adeline, casting her in shadow. “And no matter how desperate or dire, never pray to the gods that answer after dark.”
No, Adeline has decided she would rather be a tree, like Estele. If she must grow roots, she would rather be left to flourish wild instead of pruned, would rather stand alone, allowed to grow beneath the open sky. Better that than firewood, cut down just to burn in someone else’s hearth.
Stories are a way to preserve one’s self. To be remembered. And to forget.
Books, she has found, are a way to live a thousand lives—or to find strength in a very long one.
Never pray to the gods who answer after dark.
and it is sad, of course, to forget. But it is a lonely thing, to be forgotten. To remember when no one else does.
A secret kept. A record made. The first mark she left upon the world, long before she knew the truth, that ideas are so much wilder than memories, that they long and look for ways of taking root.
Loves the smell of books, and the steady weight of them on shelves, the presence of old titles and the arrival of new ones and the fact that in a city like New York, there will always be readers.
Déjà vu. Déjà su. Déjà vecu.
Being forgotten, she thinks, is a bit like going mad. You begin to wonder what is real, if you are real. After all, how can a thing be real if it cannot be remembered? It’s like that Zen koan, the one about the tree falling in the woods. If no one heard it, did it happen? If a person cannot leave a mark, do they exist?
I remember you.
Even rocks wear away to nothing.
“Small places make for small lives. And some people are fine with that. They like knowing where to put their feet. But if you only walk in other people’s steps, you cannot make your own way. You cannot leave a mark.”
“If you could only eat one thing for the rest of your life,” she says, “what would it be?”
“If you could live somewhere with only one season,” asks Henry, “what would it be?”
“Would you rather feel nothing or everything?”
Who are you, Henry Strauss?
“Because I made one, too.”
“If you could have anything,” he says, “what would you ask for?” “That depends,” she says. “What’s the cost?” “How do you know there’s a cost?” “There’s always give and take.” “Okay,” says Henry, “if you sold your soul for one thing, what would it be?” Bea chews her lip. “Happiness.”
Déjà vu. Déjà su. Déjà vecu.
That time always ends a second before you’re ready. That life is the minutes you want minus one.
