Words in Deep Blue

by Cath Crowley

The idea is that they can circle words or phrases on the pages of their favorite books. They can write notes in the margins. They can leave letters for other people who’ve read the same books.

Sometimes I think she likes post-apocalyptic fiction so much because she’s genuinely happy at the thought that the world might end.

I explain the plan to her, which is basically to wait, horizontally, for life to improve.

“No one has anything to get up for. Life’s pointless and everyone just gets up anyway. That’s how the human race works,”

Sure,

You do if you're scared

“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.

there’s nowhere to hide.

Always have to smile and hide the grief

I try not to look as faded as I feel.

“You have to start living again sometime.”

I pick the past.

Same.

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.

love is the goon that pushes us around.

if you’re in the classics section first thing in the morning, then there’s something not entirely right with your life either.

“You see it’s really a library of people,” he explains, and gives me a spare key.

The story he told me about The Log from the Sea of Cortez is perfect.

People grieving want to hear their name or to hear their trauma acknowledged

“I’ll be poor, like my dad.” “Your dad’s got two great kids and a bookstore. He might not be rich but he’s not poor.”

“Words can’t save people from cancer or bring people back from the dead.

But they can heal your soul

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

“I think that I would try to be brave. Be myself and talk about the things that people might be afraid to talk about. Death is something we shy away from, except in literature or television, when we tend to stare right at it.”

I tell her that I’ve been feeling sad about Cal, which might not be right, but it’s the truth.

Its what she needs

hate the thought that you might forget and remember, forget and remember. I think that must be exhausting. I

It is

Death isn’t little. If you think it is, you haven’t seen it.

Both are right. Its such a small part unless you are leeft behind

Love’s insane. But surely it’s not fucking insane.

It makes me feel better that she cares about that unknown family. Somehow it means that even though Cal’s death has changed both of us, it hasn’t changed us at our core. Mum and I were both there at the moment that Cal died, and sometimes I worry that seeing that has altered something so fundamental about us. Sometimes I worry we lost some of our humanness that day, and it’s not coming back. It’s hard to deny we’re harsher people without him, I think, watching Mum go out for another cigarette.

“After, at the funeral, I thought that it was cruel that in the month before he died, he thought so much about the life he wanted to have.”

Live it while you can ❤️

“Words matter, in fact. They’re not pointless, as you’ve suggested. If they were pointless, then they couldn’t start revolutions and they wouldn’t change history. If they were just words, we wouldn’t write songs or listen to them. We wouldn’t beg to be read to as kids.

I like the feeling of the book club. It was more than a conversation about books. It was a conversation about people.

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.

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.

Perhaps all things that are worthwhile are terrifying?

I’ll tell her that I think he had been transmigrating all his life: leaving himself in the things he loved, in the people he loved.

I

Say it while you can