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But she believed in love, and in the man who stood before her.
‘I love you, and I have loved you, and I will love you.’
I begged my mouth to finish the question, to stay awake long enough to hear this new answer, but I was slipping, slipping, slipping, and there, in a grave colder than Mars, next to the soul I’d loved for a hundred lives and lost in every one, we took our final breath beneath the indifferent stars.
That’s where I’d heard the word saudade before. It wasn’t easily translatable. A kind of longing, a nostalgia, a sense of incompleteness, not just romantic but existential, rooted in the very fabric of our people. Arden had suited it. Portuguese was the tongue of melancholic dreamers, of lonely poets.
The everyday tenderness of ‘I saw this and thought of you.’
How simple and beautiful life could have been. How far from that humanity had strayed.
Even though he was here to kill me, my heart burned for him.
‘If a hero is someone who will give up love to save the world, then a villain is the reverse. Someone who will give up the world to save love.’
‘Love can make a villain of anyone,’
The cruellest fate the gods and stars had ever written: the person I loved most in the world was the person who would ultimately destroy me.
Dr Schneider
Maybe that’s all love is, in the end. An endless tempting of fate.’
‘It’s an unstoppable force, and our love is an immovable object.’
The stars, indifferent. My love, beside me. Our deaths, imminent.
Every word was a blight, a tumour, a sin, a whip-crack of self-loathing across my heart.
We were nothing, but we felt like everything.
