The Brightness Between Us (The Darkness Outside Us, #2)

by Eliot Schrefer

Even if I’m worthless, even if I’m just a tool to be disposed of, useless to family or country, even if the only person who actually loved me is well and truly dead, I have this power to attract and compel. At least that’s still mine.

Incremental reform hasn’t worked. The world must be broken to be rebuilt.”

Why would I imagine my life ending? Am I starting to have another fugue episode? Or are thoughts like these part of what it means to be a normal human? Is everyone tempted to step into a pit, just to test if it will really be the end? Maybe the humanness comes in the resisting.

In a few minutes the dinner bell will ring, and we’ll sit down to our evening meal, will answer the same prompts and repeat the same stories and wonderings. Everyone will talk to and around and over me, will avoid the Thing, will reward every normal thing that I do and bristle at every weird thing that I do. They don’t want any part of the new me. They want this new Yarrow, the one that they have to worry about, to go away.

Intimacy is the only shield against insanity. Okay. But how can I be close to my family if they don’t want me to be who I truly am?

We’re all alone on this patch of soil, on this planet, solar system, galaxy. The universe is so enormous, all around me, that I keep shrinking the more that I think about the scale of it.

Even in the utter chaos and loss of yesterday, there’s something left.

as soon as we classify someone, we establish the ways in which they’re separate from us. It’s the most fundamental othering that we do.”

"Labels are the root of violence"

I don’t need to wonder about the future of us, here, now. That future is short. I will live in these current moments as fully as possible. Then I will be gone. Ambrose will be gone. Sheep will be gone. It arrives. The brightness between us.