Words in Deep Blue

by Cath Crowley

what travels forward can come back.

Humans are a highly ordered system, and once we’re disordered beyond repair, we don’t reorder.

You can’t patch up someone forgetting about you. For the rest of your life you’ll always be wondering if they’ll forget about you again. You’ll always know that they’d be a hundred percent fine without you but you wouldn’t be a hundred percent fine without them.

“If we all gave up on the things we love when it gets hard, it’d be a terrible world.”

There should be a disconnect button you can push when someone leaves: you’ve fucked me over, therefore I no longer love you. I’m not asking for the button to be connected to an ejector seat that removes them from the universe, just one small button that removes them from your heart.

“I’m pleasing to the eye, aren’t I?” I ask. “Hard to tell,” she says. “I’m blinded by your ego.”

The traces of them are hidden, small lines in books. In a library from which no one can borrow.

“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’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.

I could get through quite a bit in life with her holding my hand.

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.

Our ghosts hide in the things we leave behind.

I write “lost,” but I have grown to hate that expression. She was not a set of keys or a hat. The equivalent is saying that I have misplaced my lungs.

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.

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.