Burned (Fever #7)

by Karen Marie Moning

Self-pity is wasted emotion. It merely prolongs whatever trauma you suffered by keeping it alive in your head. Dude, you survived it. Move on.

Temptation isn’t a vice you triumph over once, completely, and then you’re free. Temptation slips into bed with you each night and helps you say prayers. It wakes you in the morning with a friendly cup of coffee, and knows just the way you take it, heavy on the sin.

I’m a moth to his flame and it frightens me how willingly I’d burn my wings off for him. Destroy the world. Follow him to Hell. It’s scary to feel like you can’t breathe without someone. That a man has so much power over you because you love him as much as, if not more than, you care for yourself.

What no one tells you is that when someone you love dies, you lose them twice. Once to death, the second time to acceptance, and you don’t walk that long, dark passage between the two alone. Grief takes every shuffling, unwilling step with you, offering a seductive bouquet of memories that can only blossom south of sanity. You can stay there, nose buried in the petals of the past. But you’re never really alive again. Spend enough time with ghosts, you become one.

Throughout the caretaker experience, your loved one’s presence is intense and exquisitely poignant and painful, then all the sudden they’re gone and you discover their absence is even more intense and exquisitely poignant and painful. You don’t know how to walk or breathe when they’re no longer there.

What do we crave for those terrible decisions we’re forced to make in the course of an average lifetime? Forgiveness. Absolution.

I look up at the sky, ponder the enormity of the universe and simply know that the same well of joy that birthed so much wonder gave us more than a single chance to explore it.

Death is the final chapter in a book you can’t unread. You keep waiting to feel like the person you were before that chapter ended. You never will.

That is how to live: in the choosing. There are no rules but those you make for yourself.