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What is a person, if not the marks they leave behind?
As a matter of habit, more automatic than faith.
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.
Books, she has found, are a way to live a thousand lives—or to find strength in a very long one.
“I do not want to belong to anyone but myself. I want to be free. Free to live, and to find my own way, to love, or to be alone, but at least it is my choice, and I am so tired of not having choices, so scared of the years rushing past beneath my feet. I do not want to die as I’ve lived, which is no life at all.
I am the darkness between stars, and the roots beneath the earth. I am promise, and potential, and when it comes to playing games, I divine the rules, I set the pieces, and I choose when to play. And tonight, I say no.”
Addie takes the first step, and feels the ground give way, feels herself tip forward, but this time, she does not fall.
So she longs for the mornings, but she settles for the nights, and if it cannot be love, well, then, at least it is not lonely.
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.
The darkness claimed he’d given her freedom, but really, there is no such thing for a woman, not in a world where they are bound up inside their clothes, and sealed inside their homes, a world where only men are given leave to roam.
“I mean feeling like it’s surging by so fast, and you try to reach out and grab it, you try to hold on, but it just keeps rushing away. And every second, there’s a little less time, and a little less air, and sometimes when I’m sitting still, I start to think about it, and when I think about it, I can’t breathe. I have to get up. I have to move.”
This is what she loves about a city like New York. It is so full of hidden chambers, infinite doors leading into infinite rooms, and if you have the time, you can find so many of them. Some she’s found by accident, others in the course of this or that adventure. She keeps them tucked away, like slips of paper between the pages of her book.
“It would be so easy to forget you. Everyone else already has.”
she is playing the part of a normal girl, a girl who gets to have a normal life, sleep with a boy and wake up to good mornings instead of who are yous.
It’s just a door. Not a period. An ellipsis. A to-be-continued.
Ideas are wilder than memories.
He doesn’t blame them for that, not now, not after. He knows he’s not an easy friend, knows he should have seen it coming, should have—
“I don’t know what they want from me,” he says. “I don’t know who they want me to be. They tell you to be yourself, but they don’t mean it, and I’m just tired…” His voice breaks. “I’m tired of falling short. Tired of being … it’s not that I’m alone. I don’t mind alone. But this—” His fingers knot in his shirtfront. “It hurts.”
she is a shining comet, dragging their focus like burning meteors in her wake.
“You didn’t know what you wanted.” “I wanted you. I wanted you to be happy.” Robbie shakes his head. “It can’t just be about the other person. You have to be someone, too. You have to know who you are.
And despite it all, he falters. Because he believes her. Or at least, he believes that she believes herself, and that is worse, because it still doesn’t make it real.
Henry can’t bring himself to go above a small, self-conscious holler, but Addie draws a breath and roars, the way you would beneath a bridge if a train was going by, and something in the fearless freedom of it gives him air, and suddenly he is emptying his lungs, the sound guttural and broken, as wild as a scream.
Addie is better than any little pink umbrella. She is better than strong whisky on a cold night. Better than anything he’s felt in ages. When Henry is with her, time speeds up, and it doesn’t scare him. When he is with Addie, he feels alive, and it doesn’t hurt.
They look at you and see whatever they want … Because they don’t see you at all.
“You can’t make people love you, Hen. If it’s not a choice, it isn’t real.”
the devil is simply a new word for a very old idea. And as for God, well, if all it takes is a flair for drama and a bit of golden trim…”
It is such a grand word, soul. Like god, like time, like space, and when she’s tried to picture it, she’s conjured images of lightning, or sunbeams through dust, of storms in the shapes of human forms, of vast and edgeless white. The truth is so much smaller.
“I’m a person, not a pet, Henry, and I don’t need you looking down at me, or coddling me either. I do what I have to, and it’s not always nice, and it’s not always fair, but it’s how I survive. I’m sorry you disapprove. But this is who I am. This is what works for me.”
“I don’t know how to be with someone,” she whispers. “I don’t know how to be a normal person.”
Ideas are wilder than memories.
Henry reaches out and runs his finger down her cheek. “You’re not a ghost.”
“Because time is cruel to all, and crueler still to artists. Because vision weakens, and voices wither, and talent fades.” He leans close, twists a lock of her hair around one finger. “Because happiness is brief, and history is lasting, and in the end,” he says, “everyone wants to be remembered.”
“Even if everyone you met remembered,” Luc says, “I would still know you best.” She searches his face. “Do I know you?” He bows his head over hers. “You are the only one who does.”
All she knows is that she is tired, and he is the place she wants to rest.
A word is everything, and his word is a serpent, a coiled trick, a curse.
That time always ends a second before you’re ready. That life is the minutes you want minus one.
