Words in Deep Blue

by Cath Crowley

“Sometimes science isn’t enough. Sometimes you need the poets,” he says, and it’s in this moment, this exact moment, that I fall in love with him again.

think that we look back and read the past with the present in our eyes. I think that’s what you’re doing.

Maybe you need to look forward, and start reading the future.

tell him about Mum and how his death has changed us forever. That’s the way it should be, I think. A death should change us forever. No two deaths should be the same.

tell her about Cal. The words still hurt, but they hurt less than they did when I told Henry, and maybe telling the next person will hurt even less.

She’s a hybrid now. The old Rachel and the new Rachel and possibly some other Rachels from the future are all tucked into her skin.

catch a glimpse of myself in the window. I’m not the old me that I’ve been for the last ten months. I’m another me. I still don’t quite recognize her. She looks, if I had to describe her, expectant.

I’m thinking of the transmigration of memory. Not the transmigration that happened in the Borges story, but the transmigration of memory that happens all the time—saving people the only way we can—holding the dead here with their stories, with their marks on the page, with their histories. It’s a very beautiful idea, and, I decide, entirely possible.

She’s wearing the same face she wore when she first came back. A stranger’s face. I can actually feel a chasm opening in my chest.

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.

Without her in the world, time did not exist. A world without time is a terrible thing. There is no certainty. Days could move quickly or slowly, or not at all. The laws of the universe have been tinkered with, and you are blindly wheeling. There is no grip in a world like this. And a kind of madness takes over.

You know that you must hold on to any laws that you can find.

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

I do believe we have choices—how we love and how much, what we read, where we travel. How we live after the person we love has died or left us. Whether or not we decide to take the risk and live again.

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.

if there is no hope of saving the things we love in their original form, we must save them however we can.