Do Not Say We Have Nothing

by Madeleine Thien

The only note he left was not a goodbye. All it said was that there were debts he couldn’t pay, failures he couldn’t live with,

Music sustained weddings, births, rituals, work, marching, boredom, confrontation and death; music and stories, even in times like these, were a refuge, a passport, everywhere.

She smiled and said, “A writer? Sentences are equations, too.”

Her mother, she thought, had all the attributes of the famous proverb: one who thrives in calamity but perishes in soft living.

Everyone thinks that with one betrayal they can save themselves and everyone they love.”

The present, Sparrow seemed to say, is all we have, yet it is the one thing we will never learn to hold in our hands.

“Was it so much to ask,” he said, “to be allowed to live one’s own life, honouring one’s parents and raising one’s children to the best of one’s ability? Why is so simple a life the most difficult to obtain?”

Sparrow feared the walls were listening and he wanted to say it was only music but could not bring himself to voice words so patently untrue.

One thing I have learned, dear Sparrow, is that light is never still and solid and so it is with love. Light can be split into many directions. Its nature is to break apart.

‘This is my fate,’ Wen the Dreamer told me. ‘To escape and continue this story, to make infinite copies, to let these stories permeate the soil, invisible and undeniable.