Everyone Brave is Forgiven

by Chris Cleave

It turned out that the only difference between children and adults was that children were prepared to put twice the energy into the project of not being sad.

All the things we make exceptional are merely

borrowed from the mundane and must without warning be surrendered to it.

To be in love was to understand how alone one had been before. It was to know that if one were ever alone again, there would be no exemption from the agony of it. It wasn’t the happiest feeling.

“But what good is it to teach a child to count, if you don’t show him that he counts for something?”

Perhaps this was what it was to grow up: this realization that the world was already staffed with people and that one was not particularly needed.

This was how a kind heart broke, after all: inward, making no shrapnel.

There was no ritual when one fell apart, society preferring to wait until one was lost entirely.