Rooms

by Lauren Oliver

we all get served a deck with some cards missing. Get up and get on with it, is what I say.

It all boils down to the same thing: are you going to play the cards you got, or are you going to fold?

maybe it’s life that is the infection: a feverish dream, a hallucination of feelings. Death is purification, a cleansing, a cure.

But that’s the beauty of life: time is yours to keep and to change. Just a few minutes can be sufficient to carve a new road, a new track. Just a few minutes, and the void is kept at bay. You will live forever with that new road inside of you, stretching away to a place suggested, barely, on the horizon. For the shortest time, shorter than the shortest second’s breath, you get to stand up to infinity. But eventually, and always, infinity wins.

The way I figure it, life’s the sum total of all our small mistakes, little tragedies, bad choices. Addition on top of addition. They pile up and pile up until the cost of keeping up appearances is too high and the weight is just too much. Then: collapse.

I had carried the weight of him for so long that without it I felt dizzy. I guess it’s the same way trees grow around the very vines that are killing them, so they’re strangled and sustained all at once. After a long time, even pain can be a comfort.