Words in Deep Blue

by Cath Crowley

Books are important. Words are important,”

“Words matter, in fact. They’re not pointless, as you’ve suggested. If they were pointless, then they couldn’t start revolutions and they wouldn’t change history. If they were just words, we wouldn’t write songs or listen to them. We wouldn’t beg to be read to as kids. If they were just words, then stories wouldn’t have been around since before we could write. We wouldn’t have learned to write. If they were just words, people wouldn’t fall in love because of them, feel bad because of them, ache because of them, and stop aching because of them. If they were just words, then Frederick would not search desperately for the Derek Walcott.”

Amy’s back. She’s mine again.

IDIOT

“I’m okay,” Rachel says, because I’m staring at her, waiting for signs that she’s not. When I look back, Frederick is standing in that formal way he has. “My wife, Elena, died twenty years ago,” he says, and the room is so quiet. He tells the group about the night she died, when he sat next to her and read from her favorite book. Rachel looks over at me. “The Walcott,” we say together.

I’m almost certain that he’s mine and I’m his.

:(

He tells the group about a book that Elena read to him from on their wedding night, and how he read to her from that same book, in the hospital, on the night that she died.

He’s changed the way I cry about Cal. The way I see the world.

Because I love it. Because I love books in a way that’s beyond logic and reason. That’s just how it is. I love them the way those people in the Letter Library love them. It’s not enough to read—I want to talk through the pages to get to the other side, to get to the person who read them before me. I want to spend my life hunting them, reading them, selling them. I want to serve customers and put the right book in their hands. I want to talk to Frederick and Frieda. I want to listen to the book club. I want it all. And I want it to go on forever. And if it can’t, then I want it right up to the very last second. And I want a girl who wants me the same way. Dust and all.

I stand outside waiting, thinking about how unfair the world is—that Cal could have had George. She loved him and he loved her and if he hadn’t gone for a swim that day, then they’d be together now.

We lose things, but sometimes they come back. Life doesn’t always happen in the order you want.

We are the books we read and the things we love. Cal is the ocean and the letters he left. Our ghosts hide in the things we leave behind.

Love of the things that make you happy is steady too—books, words, music, art—these are lights that reappear in a broken universe.

You say that the ocean is the most beautiful thing you’ve ever seen, and the thing that terrifies you the most. This describes how it was for me to fall in love with Elena. Perhaps all things that are worthwhile are terrifying?

sold our florist shop as soon as she died, but I couldn’t stay away. Go back to the ocean, Rachel. It’s a part of you, and so is Cal.

I’ll tell her about the beautiful, impossible thought that Cal might have, at the moment of dying, transmigrated. I’ll tell her that I think he had been transmigrating all his life: leaving himself in the things he loved, in the people he loved. He brimmed over the edges of his own life, and escaped.

I sit up and she says the word again. “Transmigrate. The Letter Library has to transmigrate. We have to break it up and leave it in other bookstores.”

The past is with me; the future is unmapped and changeable. Ours for the imagining, spreading out before us. Sunlight-filled, deep blue, and the darkness.