More Than This

by Patrick Ness

It isn’t, he thinks, as he trudges back toward his house, the most unfamiliar feeling in the world.

how could you keep anything for yourself in this uselessly connected world?

Here is the boy, running.

“You’ve got to hang on to something.”

“You mean Lethe.” He pronounced it Lee-Thee. “The river of forgetfulness in Hades. So the dead don’t remember their former lives and spend eternity mourning them.”

A paradise of second chances.”

You guys are my more.”

“I really came late to the guardian angel sale, didn’t I? To get the pair of you.”

Here is the boy, the man, here is Seth, being laid back gently into his coffin, the hands of his friends guiding him into place. He’s uncertain what’s going to happen next. But he is certain that that’s actually the point. If this is all a story, then that’s what the story means. If it isn’t a story, then the exact same is true. But as his friends begin the final steps, pressing buttons, answering questions on a screen, he thinks that what is forever certain is that there’s always more. Always. Maybe Owen died, maybe he didn’t, either way, it had affected his parents more than he ever considered, and maybe it was nothing to do with him. And there’s Gudmund, too, and H, and even Monica. They’re weak and strong and they make mistakes, like anyone, like he has. And love and care have all kinds of different faces, and within them, there’s room for understanding, and for forgiveness, and for more. More and more and more. Sometimes in the shape of other people, surprising people, with unexpected, unimaginable stories of their own. People who looked at the world in a completely different way and by doing so, made it different. People who could turn out to be friends. And he doesn’t know what will happen when those friends press the final sequence. He doesn’t know where he’ll wake up. Here. Or there. Or some third place, even more unexpected than this one. Because who can say in the end that any one of these places is more real than any other? But whatever happens, whatever comes,...