Rooms

by Lauren Oliver

He was the most beautiful child, with feather-blond hair and eyes the electric blue of a summer sky. Even at four or five he had a slightly tragic look, as though he had come into the world expecting beauty and elegance and had

suffered such tremendous initial disappointment that he had never recovered.

Amazing, isn’t it? That hearts that once beat in sync could be so perfectly and forever separated. That’s the whole process of life, I think: a long, slow process of separation. It can be cured only by the reabsorption into everything, into the single heartbeat of time.

The doctors told me later it was a heart attack. It happened that way sometimes, they told me. Too much drinking, too much fat in his diet, too much stress. We’re all just a collection of wires pulled tight, charged beyond capacity—a tangle of plugs and valves, waiting for a surge to take down the whole system.

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.