Challenger Deep

by Neal Shusterman

Even so, there are nights where you can’t sleep, because these things you juggle take all of your concentration. You fear that one ball might drop, and then what?

“There’s no telling how far down it goes,” the captain says, the left side of his mustache twitching like the tail of a rat. “Fall into that unknowable abyss, and you’ll be counting the days before you reach bottom.”

The things I feel cannot be put into words, or if they can, the words are in no language anyone can understand. My emotions are talking in tongues. Joy spins into anger spins into fear then into amused irony, like leaping from a plane, arms wide, knowing beyond a shadow of a doubt that you can fly, then discovering you can’t, and not only don’t you have a parachute, but you don’t have any clothes on, and the people below all have binoculars and are laughing as you plummet to a highly embarrassing doom.

Emotions get tricky for me as i dont understand them. I see that they are important but i just dont want to deal with them.

It makes me think of a friend I once had, who thought that north was whatever direction he was facing. Now I think that maybe he was right.

You are not the first and you will not be the last, and I marvel at how it makes me feel both insignificant and singled out at the same time.

Note the first withn sza and not the last it is just at times i feel all alone

carafe,

nothing awful is without its beautiful side.”

Is there something beautiful in

My job on the ship is as a “stabilizer.” I can’t recall when I was assigned this task, but I do remember the captain explaining it to me. “You shall sense as the ship heels side to side on the sea, and position yourself opposite of the roll, starboard to port, port to starboard,” the captain had said. In other words, just like a vast majority of the crewmen, my job is to run side to side across the deck and back again to counteract the rolling motion of the sea. It’s completely pointless.

Pg 21 Like Caden, ive been assugned tasjs begore that didnt seem to make any sence and were just utterly pointless

I conclude it would be a good place to be alone with my thoughts, but I should already know that my thoughts are never alone.

lattice

So what happens when your universe begins to get off balance, and you don’t have any experience with bringing it back to center? All you can do is fight a losing battle, waiting for those walls to collapse, and your life to become one huge mystery ashtray.

aft,

“You need to get over this social anxiety, Caden,” they tell me more than once. The thing is, I never had social anxiety before—I was always pretty confident and outgoing. They don’t know—I don’t even know yet—that this is the start of something bigger. It’s just the dark tip of a much larger, much deeper, much blacker pyramid.

Pg 35. Anxiety that lead to that and depression for a bit that lead down to my first break. All begining with anxiety of it. That feeling of doom and differencd that i couldn't place untill it was too late.

I’ve gotten a powerful premonition, almost like a voice, telling me I can’t go back to our hotel.

Pg 36 Prodromal phase. When symptomd just begin before the explosion. Mine when i ws a jounior so 16 or so and it was just thoes dead sets i knew something was up. Just knew 100%

“In a second.” I can’t leave yet, because I’m struck by David’s stone eyes. His body seems relaxed, like the kingdom is already his, but the expression on his face . . . it’s full of worry, and concern he’s trying to hide. I begin to wonder if David was like me. Seeing monsters everywhere and realizing there aren’t enough slingshots in the world to get rid of them.

Forget solar energy—if you could harness denial, it would power the world for generations.

Pg 53

Look into the abyss and the abyss looks into you,’”

Pg 73

“That poor shell of a woman must forever hold her torch aloft while the world does its business around her,” Calliope says sadly. “Have you ever considered how lonely it is to be the girl on a pedestal?”

Pg 85

I can’t recall when I begin to believe that the signs are giving me instructions.

When the commands become ingrand and the blur just happens more and more.

I didn’t get it at the time, but that feeling—knowing something is wrong, but not being able to pinpoint what it is—is a feeling I’ve come to know intimately.

Pg 93

I know I can’t tell them anything anymore.

How i have felt before with parents. It just slips in an eposide and i dont know how to overcome it.

There are many ways in which the “check brain” light illuminates, but here’s the screwed-up part: the driver can’t see it. It’s like the light is positioned in the backseat cup holder, beneath an empty can of soda that’s been there for a month. No one sees it but the passengers—and only if they’re really looking for it, or when the light gets so bright and so hot that it melts the can, and sets the whole car on fire.

Pg 107

What do I see when I close my eyes? I see beyond darkness, and it is immeasurably grand both above me and below.

Ive seen the worms. Ive seen the flash of lightvand dark that want to ivade the brain. A cause pointnon why i havent wanted to sleep.

“Help me,” you say. “The worm. The worm. It knows what I know, and it wants to kill me.”

A literal worm senerio for me. Tthe worms fessting out in my eyes trying yo steal my vision found deeper depth as ingrew deeper in sickness. Although flare ups now and then i just want to scream help but it seems like i can't.

The thing that’s eating you works from the inside out.

If only i read this book during Oct/Nov 2021. Could i have been comforted or would I fall deeper in my dispair?

You see demons in the eyes of the world, and the world sees a bottomless pit in yours.

Pg147

“Admitting you can’t trust yourself makes you all the more trustworthy.”

Pg 167

The fear of not living is a deep, abiding dread of watching your own potential decompose into irredeemable disappointment when “should be” gets crushed by what is. Sometimes I think it would be easier to die than to face that, because “what could have been” is much more highly regarded than “what should have been.” Dead kids are put on pedestals, but mentally ill kids get hidden under the rug.

Pg 168

I suspect there was never a returning point. This journey was destined for me before I set foot on deck. Destined from the moment I was born.

Pg 246