All Our Shimmering Skies

by Trent Dalton

‘Because sadness is the truest emotion,’ Greta says. ‘Happiness isn’t to be trusted. It’s a bald-faced liar. But the truth of your sadness enriches every other thing inside you, especially your joy. You shouldn’t be afraid to go to the place that makes you sad, Molly Hook. The more you go to that dark place inside you, the lighter it gets. You go there enough times, you realise that dark place is actually your sacred place. That place is all of you and the tears you take from that place are just the darkness leaking out, precious drop by precious drop. You following me?’

‘To live in the hearts of those we love is not to die.’

No weights of gold to measure Only scales of truth and lies For we are living treasure Under all our shimmering skies

You meet the one the universe forged in the fire just for you and they bury their love deep inside you but sometimes you don’t even know it’s inside you until it’s ripped out of you, until it’s dug up out of you like pure gold dug out of earth. The hole remains. The hole is never filled and your blood and your soul and your joy and your life leak out of that hole, until you are empty. Until you are a ghost.

And she realises that if there is treasure to be found anywhere under the shimmering skies, if there is true value beneath the high plain of heaven, then it will be the lips of lovers that will one day fire her soul and the fear that will always make her fight and the friends who will take her fears away and the children she will call her own and the wonders she will see on the trees and leaves and mountains and in the stone and iron and glass buildings that will touch the day and night skies across her world.