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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.
Day breaks like an egg yolk, spilling yellow light across the field.
Never pray to the gods that answer after dark.
“I do not want to belong to someone else,” she says with sudden vehemence. The words are a door flung wide, and now the rest pour out of her. “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—”
If a person cannot leave a mark, do they exist?
“I remember you.” Three words, large enough to tip the world. I remember you.
Even rocks wear away to nothing.
the sorrow has faded, replaced by stubborn rage, and she resolves to kindle it, to shield and nurture the flame until it takes far more than a single breath to blow it out.
Aut viam invenium aut faciam,
Nervous, like tomorrow, a word for things that have not happened yet.
“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.”
He sighs in mock lament. “The worst part of every meal is when it ends.”
Food is one of the best things about being alive. Not just food. Good food. There is a chasm between sustenance and satisfaction,
She sits in the Tuileries, skirts spread around her on the bench, and thumbs the pages of her book, and knows that she is being watched. Or rather, being stared at. But what is the point of worrying?
These days, Addie steals books as eagerly as food, a vital piece of daily nourishment.
“Diderot,”
Research
There’s the thick silence of places long sealed shut, and the muffled silence of ears stoppered up. The empty silence of the dead, and the heavy silence of the dying. There is the hollow silence of a man who has stopped praying, and the airy silence of an empty synagogue, and the held-breath silence of someone hiding from themselves. There is the awkward silence that fills the space between people who don’t know what to say. And the taut silence that falls over those who do, but don’t know where or how to start.
Because time doesn’t work like photos. Click, and it stays still. Blink, and it leaps forward.
