More Than This

by Patrick Ness

He stops. The memory is a dangerous one. He can feel himself teetering again, an abyss of confusion and despair looking right back up at him, threatening to swallow him if he so much as glances at it.

“It’s nothing I can change, right?” Seth said. “But imagine there’s this thing that always sits there in the room with you. And everyone knows it’s there and no one will ever say a single goddamn word about it until it becomes like an extra person living in your house that you have to make room for. And if you bring it up, they pretend they don’t know what you’re talking about.”

A world made of words, Seth thinks, where you live for a while.

The loneliness. In his accumulating exhaustion, the terrible loneliness of this place swamps him, just like the waves he drowned in.

“There’s more than this, Sethy,” Gudmund said. “This sucks beyond belief, but there’s more. We just have to get there.”

Relief because at last, at last, at last. At last, there didn’t have to be anymore, didn’t have to be anymore burden, anymore weight to carry.

It was almost over. He was almost there. He had never, not once in his life, felt this powerful.

The lightness of it all being over. The lightness of letting it all go.

“People see stories everywhere,” Regine says. “That’s what my father used to say. We take random events and we put them together in a pattern so we can comfort ourselves with a story, no matter how much it obviously isn’t true.” She glances back at Seth. “We have to lie to ourselves to live. Otherwise, we’d go crazy.”

Dangerous to revisit a place that most people never got to, most people never wanted to get to.

“There’s always beauty,” he said. “If you know where to look.”

“Well, don’t take any unnecessary risks.” “I think we are in a place where all risks are necessary,”

That was Gudmund’s biggest fault. That he couldn’t be anyone’s everything. But that he’d try anyway.

He was hardly aware of making a decision to start cleaning his room. Making a decision to then put on his coat. Making a decision to go to the ocean.

“I don’t believe in guardian angels,” Regine says seriously. “Just people who are there for you and people who aren’t.”

“Are you serious? Real life is only ever just real life. Messy. What it means depends on how you look at it. The only thing you’ve got to do is find a way to live there.”

“Life does not have to go how you think it will,” Tomasz says. “Not even when you are very sure what is going to happen.”

And love and care have all kinds of different faces, and within them, there’s room for understanding, and for forgiveness, and for more.

Because who can say in the end that any one of these places is more real than any other?