Bury Our Bones in the Midnight Soil

by V.E. Schwab

(She is used to wanting plenty, but it is another thing to be wanted.)

She is Orpheus, she tells herself. She won’t look back.

What is the point, she thinks, of loving something you are doomed to lose? Of holding on to someone who cannot hold on to you?

“It’s the way you cannot hide your feelings. If they do not spill out of your mouth, they shimmer on your skin. They fill the air around you, so loud they almost shout.”

“I know there is nothing you could tell me that would make me love you less, nothing that would make me want to leave.”

Perhaps that is what makes them monsters—the fact their love is marked by violence, and death, and yet. And yet. She would not change a thing.

This is why the past is left behind. Why they can only move forward, like Eurydice and Orpheus, never glancing back, lest they be trapped among the dead.

(It is a lie, Sabine told Lottie and Lottie told her, that you only get one story.) Maybe that’s what death is, and we just don’t know it. A chance to play again.