After the Flood

by Kassandra Montag

I hadn’t realized how much I lived to give my child the things I valued. How my own enjoyment of them had grown dull with age.

a man’s character is his fate.

“Maybe we don’t always make our fate, but we decide how to meet our fate,”

Who were we without people who would come after us?

laws are only laws if everyone is following them.

I knew it was sometimes easier to love ghosts than the people who were around you. Ghosts could be perfect, frozen beyond time, beyond reality, the crystal form they’d never been before, the person you needed them to be.

“I keep thinking grief feels like climbing a staircase while looking down,” she said. “You won’t forget where you’ve been, but you’ve got to keep rising. It all gets farther away, but it’s all still there. And you’ve only got one way to go and you don’t really want to go on rising, but you’ve got to. And that tightness in your chest doesn’t go away, but you somehow go on breathing that thinner, higher air. It’s like you grow a third lung. Like you’ve somehow gotten bigger when you thought you were only broken.”

Every good thing will return to you,

The world will break you, but it’s when you break yourself that you feel you really can’t heal.”

From the water we came and to the water we will return, our lungs always hungering for air, but our hearts beating like waves.

Hope would never come knocking on your door. You had to claw your way toward it, rip it out of the cracks of your loss where it poked out like some weed, and cling to it.