Words in Deep Blue

by Cath Crowley

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.

“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.

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.