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“I know it’s hard to believe, but you won’t miss her once it’s over.”
Fuck you.
And for that moment I think maybe the past few weeks really have just been some long, strange delirium.
SHE SAID THE THING
Alex saw me—he saw us, holding hands, heard Brian say I was his pair. And I was supposed to have met him an hour ago. He doesn’t know that I couldn’t get out of the house, couldn’t get a message to him. I can’t imagine what he must be thinking about me right now. Or actually, I can imagine.
He’s done with me.
Alex and I are out of time.
All of a sudden it hits me: He did this for me. Even after what happened today, he came and did this for me.
“Lena,” he says at last. “I think your mother is alive.”
Supposedly you dissipate into the heavenly matter that is God, and get absorbed by him, although they also tell us that the cured go to heaven and live forever in perfect harmony and order.
He has a secret name, just like me.
Hate isn’t the most dangerous thing, he’d said. Indifference is.
I guess that’s just part of loving people: You have to give things up. Sometimes you even have to give them up.
I realize now that that’s what the cure does, after all: It fractures people, cuts them off from themselves.
Love, the deadliest of all deadly things: It kills you both when you have it and when you don’t. But that isn’t it, exactly. The condemner and the condemned. The executioner; the blade; the last-minute reprieve; the gasping breath and the rolling sky above you and the thank you, thank you, thank you, God. Love: It will kill you and save you, both.
37 Brooks is locked.
That’s the irony of it. She’s looking at me like I’m the crazy one, the dangerous one. Meanwhile, the guy downstairs who nearly fractured my skull and bled my brains all over the pavement is the savior.
He who leaps for the sky may fall, it’s true. But he may also fly.
I’d rather die on my own terms than live on theirs. I’d rather die loving Alex than live without him.
Alex.
I love you. Remember. They cannot take it.
