Unravel Me (Shatter Me, #2)

by Tahereh Mafi

The world might be sunny-side up today.

think about the water we can’t drink and the birds that don’t fly and

But time is beyond our finite comprehension. It’s endless, it exists outside of us; we cannot run out of it or lose track of it or find a way to hold on to it. Time goes on even when we do not.

Because it’s like a real thing, this anger. I feel it wrapping itself around my fingers like I could fling it at his face. I feel it coiling itself around my spine, planting itself in my stomach and shooting branches down my legs, up my arms, through my neck. It’s choking me.

And I understand, for the first time, that I have the power to destroy everything.

I’m always apologizing. Forever apologizing. For who I am and what I never meant to be and for this body I was born into, this DNA I never asked for, this person I can’t unbecome. 17 years I’ve spent trying to be different. Every single day. Trying to be someone else for someone else.

Synonyms know each other like old colleagues, like a set of friends who’ve seen the world together. They swap stories, reminisce about their origins and forget that though they are similar, they are entirely different, and though they share a certain set of attributes, one can never be the other. Because a quiet night is not the same as a silent one, a firm man is not the same as a steady one, and a bright light is not the same as a brilliant one because the way they wedge themselves into a sentence changes everything.

Loneliness is a strange sort of thing. It creeps up on you, quiet and still, sits by your side in the dark, strokes your hair as you sleep. It wraps itself around your bones, squeezing so tight you almost can’t breathe. It leaves lies in your heart, lies next to you at night, leaches the light out from every corner. It’s a constant companion, clasping your hand only to yank you down when you’re struggling to stand up.

see him smile. It’s the kind of smile that transforms him into someone else entirely, the kind of smile that puts stars in his eyes and a dazzle on his lips and I realize I’ve never seen him like this before.

A flawless, flawless exterior for a boy with a black, black heart.

“You’re not the only person in this world who doesn’t want to get out of bed in the morning.

Sometimes I wonder about glue. No one ever stops to ask glue how it’s holding up. If it’s tired of sticking things together or worried about falling apart or wondering how it will pay its bills next week.

You pretend that a piece of yourself doesn’t exist. You live like that for a long time. For a long time, you’re safe. And then you’re not.

What I really want to say is who the hell are you and who are you to decide who gets to die.

Who are you to tell me which father I should destroy and which child I should orphan and which mother should be left without her son, which brother should be left without a sister, which grandmother should spend the rest of her life crying in the early hours of the morning because the body of her grandchild was buried in the ground before her own.

My head is full of missing buttons and shards of glass and broken pencil tips.

I’m never quite certain whether or not I’m actually alive. So I sit here. I sit here every single day.”

“Run, I said to myself. Run until your lungs collapse, until the wind whips and snaps at your tattered clothes, until you’re a blur that blends into the background. “Run, Juliette, run faster, run until your bones break and your shins split and your muscles atrophy and your heart dies because it was always too big for your chest and it beat too fast for too long and run. “Run run run until you can’t hear their feet behind you. Run until they drop their fists and their shouts dissolve in the air. Run with your eyes open and your mouth shut and dam the river rushing up behind your eyes. Run, Juliette. “Run until you drop dead. “Make sure your heart stops before they ever reach you. Before they ever touch you. “Run, I said.”

I’m all out of letters. Fresh out of words. Someone has robbed me of my entire vocabulary.

I don’t know how to hate you anymore. Even though I want to. I really want to and I know I should but I just can’t.”

want to study the secrets tucked between his elbows and the whispers caught behind his knees.

hell is empty and all the devils are here

Yes. Interesting. Yes. Sure. I think I need to lie down. “Books,” he’s saying, pulling his boxer-briefs up and rezipping his pants, “are easily destroyed. But words will live as long as people can remember them. Tattoos, for example, are very hard to forget.” He buttons his button. “I think there’s something about the impermanence of life these days that makes it necessary to etch ink into our skin,” he says. “It reminds us that we’ve been marked by the world, that we’re still alive. That we’ll never forget.”

“On the darkest days you have to search for a spot of brightness, on the coldest days you have to seek out a spot of warmth; on the bleakest days you have to keep your eyes onward and upward and on the saddest days you have to leave them open to let them cry. To then let them dry. To give them a chance to wash out the pain in order to see fresh and clear once again.”

“Nothing in this life will ever make sense to me but I can’t help but try to collect the change and hope it’s enough to pay for our mistakes.”

Because it’s so hard to see goodness in the world when all you’ve ever known is terror.

I’m only just beginning to realize how quickly I came to rely on the healing properties of an excellent hug. How desperately I’ve missed this.

“something about the way you hope for things.” He shakes his head. “It’s so naive that it’s oddly endearing. You like to believe people when they speak,” he says. “You prefer kindness.”

We don’t have to do anything at all to die. We can hide in a cupboard under the stairs our whole life and it’ll still find us.

Death will show up wearing an invisible cloak and it will wave a magic wand and whisk us away when we least expect it. It will erase every trace of our existence on this earth and it will do all this work for free.

Even as we wither away and sell our dignity to the man on the corner we breathe. We breathe when we’re wrong, we breathe when we’re right, we breathe even as we slip off the ledge toward an early grave. It cannot be undone. So I breathe.

I count all the steps I’ve climbed toward the noose hanging from the ceiling of my existence and I count out the number of times I’ve been stupid and I run out of numbers.

My mind is a mess. Every single day I’m confused, uncertain, worried I’m going to make a new mistake, worried I’m going to lose control, worried I’m going to lose myself. But it’s something I have to work through. Because for the rest of my life, I’ll always, always be stronger than everyone around me.

“I want all of you. I want you inside and out and catching your breath and aching for me like I ache for you.”

“I want to be the friend you fall hopelessly in love with. The one you take into your arms and into your bed and into the private world you keep trapped in your head. I want to be that kind of friend,” he says. “The one who will memorize the things you say as well as the shape of your lips when you say them. I want to know every curve, every freckle, every shiver of your body, Juliette—”

want to know how to convince you to design a smile just for me.”

“I do want to be your friend.” He says “I want to be your best friend in the entire world.”

“I want your mind. Your strength. I want to be worth your time.”

I’m breathing like I’m the first human who’s ever learned to fly, like I’ve been inhaling the kind of oxygen only found in the clouds

want to be paralyzed by this moment.

He’s kissing me like the world is rolling right off a cliff, like he’s trying to hang on and he’s decided to hold on to me, like he’s starving for life and love and he’s never known it could ever feel this good to be close to someone.

He has a hundred thousand million kisses and he’s giving them all to me.

His gaze is heavy, hungry, weighed down by emotion I never thought him capable of. I never thought he could be so full, so human, so real. But it’s there. It’s right there. Raw, written across his face like it’s been ripped out of his chest. He’s handing me his heart.

want it to be different now. I want you to call me Aaron.”

something pushing and pulling at my skin and trying to remind me, trying to tell me and it slaps me in the face it punches me in the jaw it dumps me right into the ocean.

“The truth,” he says, “is a painful reminder of why I prefer to live among the lies.”

It’s raining. The world is weeping at our feet in anticipation of what we’re about to do.

The world around us is a blurry landscape of blues and grays and mottled hues and the few trees still standing have a hundred shaky, quivering arms ripping through their trunks, reaching up to the sky as if in prayer, begging for relief from the tragedy they’ve been rooted in.

They never asked for this.

The message from the sky is clear: we are pissed.