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“And what of Heaven?” asked Adeline. “Heaven is a nice spot in the shade, a broad tree over my bones.”
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.
The day passes like a sentence. The sun falls like a scythe.
Her dress is simple and light, but it might as well be made of mail for how it weighs on her.
So she longs for the mornings, but she settles for the nights, and if it cannot be love, well, then, at least it is not lonely.
Déjà vu. Déjà su. Déjà vecu.
Live long enough, and you learn how to read a person. To ease them open like a book, some passages underlined and others hidden between the lines.
And Addie doesn’t shrink away. She simply raises her voice, and together they shout themselves breathless, they scream themselves hoarse, they leave the cubes feeling dizzy and light. His lungs will hurt tomorrow, and it will be worth it.
Then again, he never felt at home at home, only a vague sense of dread, the eggshell-laden walk of someone constantly in danger of disappointing.
And then, one day, he meets a girl.
And when the girl looks at him, she doesn’t see perfect. She sees someone who cares too much, who feels too much, who is lost, and hungry, and wasting inside his curse. She sees the truth, and he doesn’t know how, or why, only knows that he doesn’t want it to end.
A life reduced to a block of stone, a patch of grass.
Magritte,
She hates the way it makes her feel to hear him say her name, hates the way she leans into the word like a body seeking shelter from a storm.
“Because time is cruel to all, and crueler still to artists. Because vision weakens, and voices wither, and talent fades.”
And when she looks up into his eyes, she sees a new shade of green, and knows exactly what it is. The color of a man off-balance. His chest rises and falls as if it were a human thing. Here is a place to put the knife. “I would rather be a ghost.”
A year. It seemed like so long, once. Now it is no time at all.
And Addie realizes that she is going to lose him, the way she has lost everyone. And she doesn’t know if she can do it, not again, not this time. Hasn’t she lost enough?
“How do you walk to the end of the world?” He looks up at her. “I wanted to hold on to every step.”
Her grip tightens around his, and his tightens back, and they hold on until it hurts, as if any minute someone might try to pull them apart, as if the other might slip free, and disappear.
He pulls her back against him, and Addie notices again the perfect way they fit together. As if he was made for her. Which, of course, he was.
She knows that, whatever this is, it will not last. It cannot last. Nothing ever does. But in the moment, she is happy.
This is how it ends.
A story is an idea, wild as a weed, springing up wherever it is planted.
They would say that he is a fickle god, and long before he loved her, he hated her, he drove her mad, and with her flawless memory, she became a student of his machinations, a scholar of his cruelty.
