More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
He is, after all, only a figment of her mind. A companion crafted first from boredom, and then from longing. A dream, to keep her company.
“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—”
She would love a place like this. A place of her own. A bed molded to her body. A wardrobe full of clothes. A home, decorated with markers of the life she’s lived, the material evidence of memory. But she cannot seem to hold on to anything for long. It is not as though she hasn’t tried. Over the years, she’s collected books, hoarded art, hidden fine dresses away in chests and locked them there. But no matter what she does, things always go missing. They vanish, one by one, or all at once, stolen by some strange circumstance, or simply time.
swears sometimes her memory runs forward as well as back, unspooling to show the roads she’ll never get to travel. But that way lies madness, and she has learned not to follow.
But she forces herself to shake her head and answer, “I will live.” She has no choice.
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?
If a person cannot leave a mark, do they exist?
If some part of her wavered, if some small part wanted to give in, it did not last beyond a moment. There is a defiance in being a dreamer.
“My name is Addie LaRue. I was born in Villon in the year 1691, my parents were Jean and Marthe, and we lived in a stone house just beyond an old yew tree…”
Blink and you’re twenty-eight, and everyone else is now a mile down the road, and you’re still trying to find it, and the irony is hardly lost on you that in wanting to live, to learn, to find yourself, you’ve gotten lost.
“I think I’d rather live and wonder.”
“I don’t know how to be with someone,” she whispers. “I don’t know how to be a normal person.” His mouth quirks into a crooked grin. “You’re incredible, and strong, and stubborn, and brilliant. But I think it’s safe to say you’re never going to be normal.”
They’ve been lucky, so lucky, but the trouble with luck is that it always ends. And perhaps it is just the nervous tapping of Henry’s fingers on the journal. And perhaps it is just the moonless sky. And perhaps it is just that happiness is frightening.
It has been a long time since Addie felt true fear. Sadness, she knows; loneliness and grief. But fear belongs to those with more to lose.
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.
And she does not want to miss it—any of it.
“Do you still have feelings for him?” And she wants to be honest, to say that of course she does. She never gets closure, never gets to say good-bye—no periods, or exclamations, just a lifetime of ellipses. Everyone else starts over, they get a blank page, but hers are full of text. People talk about carrying torches for old flames, and it’s not a full fire, but Addie’s hands are full of candles. How is she supposed to set them down, or put them out? She has long run out of air. But it is not love.
“Because happiness is brief, and history is lasting, and in the end,” he says, “everyone wants to be remembered.”
Greatness requires sacrifice.
“Nothing is all good or all bad,” she says. “Life is so much messier than that.” And there in the dark, he asks if it was really worth it. Were the instants of joy worth the stretches of sorrow? Were the moments of beauty worth the years of pain? And she turns her head, and looks at him, and says, “Always.”
