Reached (Matched, #3)

by Ally Condie

For a few long moments, none of us speak. When things like this happen—when what was meant to help results in harm, when a salve brings pain instead of healing—it is clear how wrong even choices intended to be right can become.

draw in a ragged breath, the kind you take when the pain is too deep to cry, when you can’t cry because all you are is pain, and if you let some of it out, you might cease to exist. I want to do something to make this better, even

The spring wind is playful, pushing me one way, pulling me another. It spins some of last fall’s leaves up into the air, and I wonder, if I climbed up on the air-train platform and jumped, if the spiral of wind would catch me and take me up twirling.

I cannot think of falling without thinking of flying. I could do it, I think, if I found a way to make wings.

I’ve never had permission to go on the Hill, and I look back up at the riot of plants and forest behind the workers. What is it like in a place so wild?

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Xander’s journeys happened in those walled rooms and long hallways of the sick, when he worked with Lei. When I saw him again in the Pilot’s air ship, Xander had already been places I would never go and become someone else. But I didn’t see it. I believed him unchanging, a stone in all good senses of the word, solid, dependable, something and someone you could build upon. But he is as we all are: light as air, transient as wisps of cloud before the sun, beautiful and fleeting, and if I ever did truly have hold of him, that has ended now.

When we fall in love the first time, we don’t know anything. We risk a lot less than we do if we choose to love again.

But we do find answers in beauty, more often than not.

She’s right. We would compose poems about love and tell stories that have been heard in some form before.

But it would be our first time feeling and telling.

“Sometimes paper is only paper,” my mother says.

“Words are just words. Ways to capture the real thing. Don’t be afraid to remember that.”

I know what she means. Writing, painting, singing—it cannot stop everything. Cannot halt death in its tracks. But perhaps it can make the pause between death’s footsteps sound and look and feel beautiful, can make the space of waiting a place where you can linger without as much fear. For we are all walking eac...

I can already feel some things slipping through my fingers like sand and water, like artifacts and poems,

like everything you want to hold on to and can’t.

There is ebb and flow. Leaving and coming. Flight and fall. Sing and silent. Reaching and reached.