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“No one has anything to get up for. Life’s pointless and everyone just gets up anyway. That’s how the human race works,”
“The broken heart. You think you will die, but you just keep living, day after day after terrible day.”
Secondhand books are full of mysteries, which is why I like them.
Hugh Howey, Kurt Vonnegut, Ursula K. Le Guin, Margaret Atwood, John Green, Tolstoy (just read Anna Karenina), J. K. Rowling, Philip Pullman, Kirsty Eagar, Melina Marchetta, Charlotte Brontë, and Donna Tartt.
She’d read 1984 by George Orwell and The One Safe Place by Tania Unsworth. She’d started The Road by Cormac McCarthy.
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.
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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.
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.
Sometimes, the end begins.
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.
