When the Sky Fell on Splendor

by Emily Henry

THE NIGHT OF THE crash started like most had that summer: with the six of us, and one mouth-breathing border collie, crammed into Remy’s clunky Geo Metro, rumbling down Old Crow Station Lane.

We never talked about it, never said it aloud, but if things were different, if the accident hadn’t happened, the six of us wouldn’t be here. We wouldn’t be the Ordinary; we probably wouldn’t even be casual friends.

The less we remembered, the happier we all were.

The six of us were destined to be alone, trapped in a grief we weren’t willing or able to share, but from then on, at least we were alone together.

If you couldn’t control life, you could at least remove yourself from it, never experience its pain too deeply. That was the only way to survive.

Sometimes the anger was too much. Sometimes I thought that if you peeled back my skin, that would be all that was there: a burning red hate for this world and what it did to people callously, every second, every day.

Either way, whether I just loved Remy or I love-loved him, opening yourself up like that backfired. I’d learned from the accident that people, even the ones you love, are temporary.

“The point is, nothing in our universe, even the stuff that’s supposedly deleted from time and space, is ever really lost. It’s just hidden from our sight.”

Sometimes it was better to float through that liminal space that came before you found the truth.

“People always say they don’t want anyone to feel bad for them, but is it so bad to want that? Is it so evil to want anyone on this earth to love, or even like, you, enough to care that—that”—he clamped his hand hard over his heart, and his voice came out threadbare—“you hurt too.

Something—maybe even the thing you love the most—implodes, collapses right in front of you. And the gravitational force of the thing it forms is so strong it pulls on everything else, warps the very fabric of your little place in space-time. It bends the past around you so it keeps repeating, and you can’t see what comes next. You’ll want to run from it. You’ll want to escape before it can suck you into its darkness. But black holes don’t really suck. And whatever falls into them isn’t really gone. Even the light is just hidden. Just for now.