Words in Deep Blue

by Cath Crowley

“If a person wants to spend forever with you, that’s love.”

“The broken heart. You think you will die, but you just keep living, day after day after terrible day.”

Doesn’t love fall somewhere in the big scheme of things? Isn’t it the biggest scheme?

“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.

I wonder if the future sends us hints to get us ready, so that the grief doesn’t kill us when it comes.

I believe in a lot of things that you don’t—you know I’m superstitious. But I don’t believe that the future gives us signs. I 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.

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.

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.

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.