Words in Deep Blue

by Cath Crowley

These must be the most depressing words in the history of love. I tried really hard to love you.

It was a strange night. I look back and the thing I remember about it is the sky. I hadn’t seen one like it before. Flat and starless, as though the world had become a box with a lid on it. I couldn’t sleep. I sat on the balcony, staring up for a long time, knowing there were planets and stars and galaxies, but not believing in them anymore.

“My love for you is unconditional, but you’re an idiot when you drink.”

Shit nights roll into shit mornings that roll into shit afternoons and back into shit, starless midnights. Shitness, my sister says, has a momentum that good luck just doesn’t have.

But do you need to understand it to love it? You think it’s beautiful—that’s enough,”

Life is the big scheme; death is the little one at the end.

“That’s what we think because we can’t imagine what it’s like to not exist.”

“Sometimes science isn’t enough. Sometimes you need the poets,”

I think it was a sign. I think that we got so many signs and we ignored them because we didn’t believe in them then. I wonder if the future sends us hints to get us ready, so that the grief doesn’t kill us when it comes.

“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.

We lose things, but sometimes they come back.

Life doesn’t always happen in the order you want.

It is a kiss that continues through the years. But at this moment, it is just the start.

We are the books we read and the things we love.

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