Words in Deep Blue

by Cath Crowley

I explain the plan to her, which is basically to wait, horizontally, for life to improve.

It’s a truth universally acknowledged, according to George, that shit days get shitter. 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.

Without a doubt, it’s Cal’s handwriting. I know from the way the tail of his e kicks upward. I know it because he loved the octopus. I know because he loved this book. I know it in a way I can’t prove. It doesn’t make me sad, exactly. It’s a feeling I can’t seem to name. — I think about it for the rest of the week, and by Sunday I decide the feeling has something to do with Cal being in a library along with other people who no longer exist in the world. The traces of them are hidden, small lines in books. In a library from which no one can borrow.

“After, at the funeral, I thought that it was cruel that in the month before he died, he thought so much about the life he wanted to have.” “I don’t know how to talk to you about this,” Henry says, “because I’ve never been where you are. But I will be where you are, at some stage in the future, because it’s impossible for me not to be. And it seems to me as though you’re looking at it the wrong way around.” He tells me that maybe Cal got lucky. Those last days seemed so beautiful, filled with golden light. “Maybe he didn’t get screwed over by the universe. Maybe it was trying to cram everything in for him.”

“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.

“Henry,” she says, and out of nowhere. “I love you.” And it’s a small spot of light in the darkness. It’s brilliant, unbelievably brilliant. Life is still shit, but it’s great at the same time. Honesty and bravery are contagious, so I take Rachel’s hands. I’m shaking a little, which is to be expected since I’m about to tell her that I love her, too.

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.

My family might be shit at love, but I know what love’s not when I see it. At least I do now. I feel like a bit of a dickhead thinking back on all the times I’ve thrown myself at Amy over the years. I’m not too hard on myself, though, because I think there’s probably a lot of people in the world who’ve felt like a bit of a dickhead because they’ve thrown themselves at a person they love who doesn’t love them back. So, statistically speaking, I’m average, and I can live with that.

“I don’t know how to tell her,” I say into the quiet. “Perhaps start by telling her she was loved.”

In the journal, just as I expected, there’s a letter for George. I hand it over without looking at it, and she reads it aloud to me. Cal loved George and she loved him back, and that’s no small thing. I look up at the light-drowned sky. I locate a star. — The letter is beautiful and brave, and hearing Cal’s words makes me know for certain that Henry was right. I’ve had the world the wrong way around. It’s life that’s important. Cal knew that. He was living right up until the last second, leaving that note for George. I have to tell Henry that I lied. I do love him.

messed up. I just didn’t know what I know now. It’s you and the bookshop that I want. I don’t need loads of money. I can live without a definite future as long as you’re in that indefinite future with me.”

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. Do people have a choice in the direction their lives will go? We cannot choose where and when we are born, by whom or how we are first loved, or with whom we will fall in love—at least, I do not believe so. And we cannot choose who is taken from us, or the way in which they are taken.

But 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.