Release

by Patrick Ness

Why did everyone no longer a teenager automatically dismiss any feeling you had then? Who cared if he’d grow out of it? That didn’t make it any less true in those painful and euphoric days when it was happening. The truth was always now, even if you were young. Especially if you were young.

It was so much easier to be loved than to have to do any of the desperate work of loving.

“All hands are alike. As alike as they are different.”

This tedious, endless anger. Was that all there was ever going to be? Would it just twist him and twist him, obliterating everything else so he lost the ability to know when he should be angry because that was all there ever was?

Because what if they were right? What if there was something wrong with him? What if, on some level, way down deep inside, right down to the very simplest, purified form of who he was, what if he was corrupted? What if there was some tiny, tiny fault in the first building blocks of who he was, and everything since that first moment of life was just papering over an essential crack? And he was just a carapace built on a facade built on scaffolding and there was no real core to him, no real central worth? At all? Can I love? he thought. Can I? Can I be loved?

“You have no idea how much I work to love you.”

maybe hearts don’t ever stop breaking once broken. Maybe they just keep on beating, until they’re broken again, and then they keep on beating still.

You searched for me when I was lost.”