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this is the moment when none of it feels fair, the only time she feels the wave of frustration threatening to break. Because she has spent weeks getting to know him. And he has spent hours forgetting her.
everyone speaks of her as if she is a summer bloom, something to be plucked, and propped within a vase, intended only to flower and then to rot.
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. Stories come in so many forms: in charcoal, and in song, in paintings, poems, films. And books. Books, she has found, are a way to live a thousand lives—or to find strength in a very long one.
Adeline was going to be a tree, and instead, people have come brandishing an ax.
attraction can look an awful lot like recognition in the wrong light.
Funny, how some people take an age to warm, and others simply walk into every room as if it’s home.
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.
What a luxury, to tell one’s story. To be read, remembered.
She stands there until she realizes she is waiting. Waiting for someone to help. To come and fix the mess she’s in. But no one is coming. No one remembers, and if she resigns herself to waiting, she will wait forever.
Time begins to lose its meaning—and yet, she has not lost track of time. She cannot seem to misplace it (no matter how she tries)
A year she’s spent bound within the prism of this deal, forced to suffer but not die, starve but not waste, want but not wither.
See? She is learning.
it would be a lie to say she does not waver. To say that no part of her wants to give up, give in, if only for a moment. Perhaps it is that part that asks. “What would become of me?”
Perhaps she is lonelier than she would say. Perhaps an enemy’s company is still better than none.
“I remember you.” Three words, large enough to tip the world. I remember you.
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It’s less hostile than suspicion, more guarded than relief, and it is still wonderful, because of the knowing in it. Not a first meeting, but a second—or rather, a third—and for once she is not the only one who knows.
“Upstate. Newburgh. You?”
For all her effort, Addie is like a clock wound tighter as the day draws near, a coiled spring that cannot loosen until dawn. And even then, it is a grim unwinding, less relief than resignation, the knowledge that it will start again.
But his strides are long enough to match her speed, and five minutes later they round the corner, and there it is. The Nitehawk lights up the darkening street, white bulbs tracing patterns on the brick façade, the word CINEMA picked out in red neon light across its front. Addie has been to every movie theater in Brooklyn, the massive multiplexes with their stadium seats and the indie gems with worn-out sofas, has witnessed every mixture of new releases and nostalgia. And the Nitehawk is one of her favorites.
trying to be kind, but she cannot bear it, so she gets up and dresses as fast as she can,
It will be many years before she can read Greek, many more before she hears the myth of Sisyphus, but when she does, she will nod in understanding, palms aching from the weight of pushing stones uphill, heart
heavy from the weight of watching them roll down again. In this moment, there is no myth for company. Only this beautiful boy with his back to her.
But this is how you walk to the end of the world. This is how you live forever. Here is one day, and here is the next, and the next, and you take what you can, savor every stolen second, cling to every moment, until it’s gone. So she says yes.
He may be a sun, but she is a shining comet, dragging their focus like burning meteors in her wake.
The images spill out of her, and through him, and onto the wall with a clumsy, frenzied need. And she is laughing, tears streaming down her cheeks, and he wants to wipe them away, but his hands are her hands, and she is drawing.
That word, like a tear in the veil. And for all the pain, and terror, of this moment, Addie knows she will not give in. She has survived worse. She will survive worse. This is nothing but a god’s foul temper.
How does a ceiling bring you closer to heaven? If God is so large, why build walls to hold Him in?
Despite it all, Addie is not jealous. She has lived too long and lost too much, and what little she’s had has been borrowed or stolen, never kept to herself. She has learned to share—and yet, every time Henry steals a glance her way, she feels a pleasant flush of warmth, as welcome as the sudden appearance of sunlight between clouds.
I do what I have to, and it’s not always nice, and it’s not always fair, but it’s how I survive.
this is a new kind of silence. The silent aftermath of storms, the damage not yet tallied.
Memories are stiff, but thoughts are freer things. They throw out roots, they spread and tangle, and come untethered from their source. They are clever, and stubborn, and perhaps—perhaps—they are in reach.
There are days when she mourns the prospect of another year, another decade, another century. There are nights when she cannot sleep, moments when she lies awake and dreams of dying. But then she wakes, and sees the pink and orange dawn against the clouds, or hears the lament of a lone fiddle, the music and the melody, and remembers there is such beauty in the world.
They are Orpheus, she is Eurydice, and every time they turn back, she is ruined.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” she pleads. Henry is quiet for a moment, and then he says, “How do you walk to the end of the world?”
He looks up at her. “I wanted to hold on to every step.”
“Is it such a bad thing…” His mouth trails along her jaw. “… to be savored?” His breath brushes her ear. “To be relished?”
He tastes like the air at night, heady with the weight of summer storms. He tastes like the faint traces of far-off woodsmoke, a fire dying in the dark. He tastes like the forest, and somehow, impossibly, like home.
And one night Addie wakes in the dark to the soft pressure of his fingertips drawing patterns on her skin, and she is struck by the look in his eyes. No, not the look. The knowing.
Whenever Addie feels herself forgetting, she presses her ear to his bare chest and listens for the drum of life, the drawing of breath, and hears only the woods at night, the quiet hush of summer. A reminder that he is a lie, that his face and his flesh are simply a disguise.
She missed him the way someone might miss the sun in winter, though they still dread its heat. She missed the sound of his voice, the knowing in his touch, the flint-on-stone friction of their conversations, the way they fit together. He is gravity.
“It’s my own name I ache for, not your lips.”
And this, he decides, is what a good-bye should be. Not a period, but an ellipsis, a statement trailing off, until someone is there to pick it up.
That time always ends a second before you’re ready. That life is the minutes you want minus one.
Because the girl he loved is gone. And he’s still here. He remembers everything.
Belief is a bit like gravity. Enough people believe a thing, and it becomes as solid and real as the ground beneath your feet.
