Delirium (Delirium, #1)

by Lauren Oliver

The most dangerous sicknesses are those that make us believe we are well. —Proverb 42, The Book of Shhh

Things weren’t always as good as they are now. In school we learned that in the old days, the dark days, people didn’t realize how deadly a disease love was. For a long time they even viewed it as a good thing, something to be celebrated and pursued. Of course that’s one of the reasons it’s so dangerous: It affects your mind so that you cannot think clearly, or make rational decisions about your own well-being. (That’s symptom number twelve, listed in the amor deliria nervosa section of the twelfth edition of The Safety, Health, and Happiness Handbook, or The Book of Shhh, as we call it.) Instead people back then named other diseases—stress, heart disease, anxiety, depression, hypertension, insomnia, bipolar disorder—never realizing that these were, in fact, only symptoms that in the majority of cases could be traced back to the effects of amor deliria nervosa.

We’ll be adults—cured, tagged and labeled and paired and identified and placed neatly on our life path, perfectly round marbles set to roll down even, well-defined slopes.

“I think it’s a little bit strange that I go pretty much my whole life without seeing you, and then all of a sudden I start seeing you everywhere.”

“Maybe you just haven’t been paying attention,” he says quietly, rocking forward slightly on his heels.

but in that moment the giddiness and happiness is still flowing strong and I feel like I could tell Alex anything, ask him anything. So I say, “Can I tell you a secret?” I don’t wait for him to answer; I don’t have to, and knowing that makes me feel dizzy and careless.

It’s comforting to listen to his low, forceful directives, to let myself go.

“Everyone is asleep. They’ve been asleep for years. You seemed . . . awake.” Alex is whispering now. He closes his eyes, opens them again. “I’m tired of sleeping.”

“Are you sure that being like everybody else will make you happy?”

all I can think is: It will kill me, it will kill me, it will kill me. And I don’t care.

I would dream of the firmness of his chest pressed against mine and the strength of his hands and his voice saying, “Let me show you.”

For the first time in my life I’ve done something for me and by choice and not because somebody told me it was good or bad.

and again I have the sensation of falling into his eyes. But this time it’s not dizzying. It’s the opposite—grounding, like he’s whispering to me wordlessly, saying he’s there and he’s with me and we’re fine.

Maybe it’s the way he listens so quietly, and stares at me steadily with his eyes bright and warm, and never judges me.

And, of course, we kiss. We kiss so much that when we’re not kissing it feels weird, like I get used to breathing through his lips and into his mouth.

But then he breathes, “Beautiful,” and when his eyes meet mine I know that he really, truly means it.

That night, for the first time in my life, I stand in front of the bathroom mirror and don’t see an in-between girl. For the first time, with my hair swept back and my nightgown slipping off one shoulder and my eyes glowing, I believe what Alex said. I am beautiful.

Nothing has ever been so painful or delicious as being so close to him and being unable to do anything about it:

Yet in other ways I feel like I do know him, and have always known him, without having to be told anything at all.

It’s an incredible thing, how you can feel so taken care of by someone and yet feel, also, like you would die or do anything just for the chance to protect him back.

They told us that love was a disease. They told us it would kill us in the end. For the very first time I realize that this, too, might be a lie.

My feet hit the ground. Alex takes my hand and pulls me quickly into the woods, away from the border. Into the Wilds.

I’d actually forgotten that I’m supposed to be plain. I’m so used to Alex telling me I’m beautiful. I’m so used to feeling beautiful around him. A hollow opens up in my chest. This is what life will be like without him: Everything will become ordinary again. I’ll become ordinary again.

Stupid, stupid—to be so careless with our time, to believe we had so much of it left.

Unimaginable, incomprehensible: a life lived without him. The idea breaks me—the fact that he’s almost crying breaks me—the fact that he did this for me, the fact that he believes I’m worth it—kills me. He is my world and my world is him and without him there is no world. “I won’t do it. I won’t go through with it. I can’t. I want to be with you. I need to be with you.”

We stand there for one more moment, looking at each other, and in that instant I feel our connection so strongly it’s as though it achieves physical existence, becomes a hand all around us, cupping us together, protecting us. This is what people are always talking about when they talk about God: this feeling, of being held and understood and protected. Feeling this way seems about as close to saying a prayer as you could get, so I follow Alex

So many hours, so many days, looping those same four letters over and over: that strange and terrifying word, the word that confined her here for over ten years. And, ultimately, the word that helped her escape. In the lower half of one wall, she has traced the word so many times in such enormous script—LOVE, each letter the size of a child—and gouged so deeply into the stone that the O has formed a tunnel, and she has gotten out.

Now that I know I’ll have him—that we have each other—I feel as though I’ll never be afraid of anything ever again.