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But a life without art, without wonder, without beautiful things—she would go mad. She has gone mad. What she needs are stories.
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.
she 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.
and it is sad, of course, to forget. But it is a lonely thing, to be forgotten. To remember when no one else does.
that ideas are so much wilder than memories, that they long and look for ways of taking root.
Three words, large enough to tip the world. I remember you.
Live long enough, and you learn how to read a person. To ease them open like a book, some passages underlined and others hidden between the lines.
“I want to see you again,” says Henry. The hope fills her chest until it hurts. She’s heard those words a hundred times, but for the first time, they feel real. Possible. “I want you to see me again, too.”
Date. The word thrills through her. A date is something made, something planned; not a chance of opportunity, but time set aside at one point for another, a moment in the future.
“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.”
It will take time, but time is the one thing Addie has plenty of. So she opens her eyes, and starts again.
“I want to see you again.” “I want you to see me again,” she echoes.
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.
“The nicest days are always the ones we don’t plan.”
She has gotten good at losing things. But Henry is still here.
It is easy to be honest when there are no wrong words, because the words don’t stick.
But Henry is different, he hears her, he remembers, and suddenly every word is full of weight, honesty such a heavy thing.
What I want, what I’ve always truly wanted, is for someone to remember me.
She smiles, and Henry’s world goes brighter. She turns away, and it is dark again.
I remember seeing that picture and realizing that photographs weren’t real. There’s no context, just the illusion that you’re showing a snapshot of a life, but life isn’t snapshots, it’s fluid. So photos are like fictions. I loved that about them. Everyone thinks photography is truth, but it’s just a very convincing lie.”
There’s too much space to think. There’s not enough to breathe.
And when the girl looks at him, she doesn’t see perfect. She sees someone who cares too much, who feels too much, who is lost, and hungry, and wasting inside his curse.
She sees the truth, and he doesn’t know how, or why, only knows that he doesn’t want it to end. Because for the first time in months, in years, in his whole life, perhaps, Henry doesn’t feel cursed at all. For the first time, he feels seen.
There is a freedom, after all, in being forgotten.
Here is a new kind of silence, rarer than the rest. The easy quiet of familiar spaces, of places that fill simply because you are not alone within them.
“The vexing thing about time,” he says, “is that it’s never enough. Perhaps a decade too short, perhaps a moment. But a life always ends too soon.”
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. And she does not want to miss it—any of it.
“Because happiness is brief, and history is lasting, and in the end,” he says, “everyone wants to be remembered.”
History is a thing designed in retrospect.
What is the point in planting seeds? Why tend them? Why help them grow? Everything crumbles in the end. Everything dies.
It is just a storm, he tells himself, but he is tired of looking for shelter. It is just a storm, but there is always another waiting in its wake.
“How do you walk to the end of the world?” He looks up at her. “I wanted to hold on to every step.”
“Nothing is all good or all bad,” she says. “Life is so much messier than that.”
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.”
That time always ends a second before you’re ready. That life is the minutes you want minus one.
“Do you know how you live three hundred years?” she says. And when he asks how, she smiles. “The same way you live one. A second at a time.”
It was messy. It was hard. It was wonderful, and strange, and frightening, and fragile—so fragile it hurt—and it was worth every single moment.
“Think of it as a thank-you,” she says, “for seeing me. For showing me what it’s like to be seen. To be loved. Now you get a second chance. But you have to let them see you as you are. You have to find people who see you.”
“Life can feel very long sometimes, but in the end, it goes so fast.”
Because the girl he loved is gone. And he’s still here. He remembers everything.
