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What is a person, if not the marks they leave behind?
Don’t you remember, she told him then, when you were nothing but shadow and smoke? Darling, he’d said in his soft, rich way, I was the night itself.
the greatest danger in change is letting the new replace the old.
Her mother says that the woman is bound for Hell, and once, when Adeline repeated as much, Estele laughed her dry-leaf laugh and said there was no such place, only the cool dark soil and the promise of sleep. “And what of Heaven?” asked Adeline. “Heaven is a nice spot in the shade, a broad tree over my bones.”
😮💨 when this comes full circle
“And no matter how desperate or dire, never pray to the gods that answer after dark.”
If she must grow roots, she would rather be left to flourish wild instead of pruned, would rather stand alone, allowed to grow beneath the open sky. Better that than firewood, cut down just to burn in someone else’s hearth.
Stories are a way to preserve one’s self. To be remembered. And to forget. Stories come in so many forms: in charcoal, and in song, in paintings, poems, films. And books. Books, she has found, are a way to live a thousand lives—or to find strength in a very long one.
It is so much easier to share a secret than to keep one,
There have been times, of course, when she wished her memory more fickle, when she would have given anything to welcome madness, and disappear. It is the kinder road, to lose yourself.
But it is a lonely thing, to be forgotten. To remember when no one else does.
“With time,” she said, “you can get used to anything.”
and thinks, not for the first time, and certainly not for the last, how much simpler it would be to be a man, how easily they move through the world, and at such little cost.
“I fashioned myself to suit you. To put you at ease.” Anger rises in her chest. “You have ruined the one thing I still had.” “How sad, that you had only dreams.”
Aut viam invenium aut faciam, and so on.” She does not know Latin yet, and he does not offer a translation, but a decade from now, she will look up the words, and learn their meaning. To find a way, or make your own.
“Small places make for small lives. And some people are fine with that. They like knowing where to put their feet. But if you only walk in other people’s steps, you cannot make your own way. You cannot leave a mark.”
Blink and you’re twenty-eight, and everyone else is now a mile down the road, and you’re still trying to find it, and the irony is hardly lost on you that in wanting to live, to learn, to find yourself, you’ve gotten lost.
And in the photo, we all look so . . . happy. I remember seeing that picture and realizing that photographs weren’t real. There’s no context, just the illusion that you’re showing a snapshot of a life, but life isn’t snapshots, it’s fluid. So photos are like fictions. I loved that about them. Everyone thinks photography is truth, but it’s just a very convincing lie.”
It has never occurred to her that he could come as he pleased, that he is not bound in some way by the dates of their deal. That his visits, just like the absence of them, have always been by design—by choice.
“You are not capable of love because you cannot understand what it is to care for someone else more than yourself. If you loved me, you would have let me go by now.” Luc flicks his fingers. “What nonsense,” he says. “It is because I love you that I won’t. Love is hungry. Love is selfish.”
“I am in the business of souls, Adeline, not second chances.”
