Words in Deep Blue

by Cath Crowley

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

It was a strange night. I look back and the thing I remember about it is the sky. I hadn’t seen one like it before. Flat and starless, as though the world had become a box with a lid on it. I couldn’t sleep. I sat on the balcony, staring up for a long time, knowing there were planets and stars and galaxies, but not believing in them anymore.

I think you’ve got your schemes the wrong way around. Life is the big scheme; death is the little one at the end.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

On a night when I could hear the ocean coming in through the window of my room, a woman I would marry and have a child with told me she loved me. Our son was just a hint on our skins. The stars were milk on the darkness. I did not think about losing her. I thought only that she loved me, and we were happy.