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“Moonshine,” he whispered. “You fill up the empty, dark space—like the moon owns the sky. It is quiet. It is bright. It doesn’t need to be a ball of flame to be noticed. It simply exists. It forever glows.”
“Artists are terminally dissatisfied. With life. With love. With their work. You like being tortured, don’t you, little Luna? Sadness has a bittersweet aftertaste. Keeps us going.” He lit up his joint. “Being an artist is a miserable job. You’re pregnant with your work, only to give the baby away. An entire year of careful strokes of a brush, just to have someone else buy the painting. You can be miserable anywhere, Luna.
Heroin is made out of Poppy. Coincidently, you bore me to death.”
Her throat bobbed, and all I could think was, it’s just a throat. I didn’t want to kiss it. I didn’t want to trace it with my fingers. To strangle it. To cover every inch of it with my tongue and lips and teeth, like I’d imagined whenever I’d looked at Luna.
“Know what the problem with your generation is? You refuse to understand that love has a price. That’s what makes it significant, pungent, rich. It costs you anger, jealousy, heartbreak, time, money, health…”
“Look…” She turned to me. “When you find the one, all the other details blur together. I don’t know what I want to wear when I wed him. I don’t know what my hair is going to look like, or how many guests I want to invite, or if I want a beach wedding, or one in a fancy hotel, or to elope in Vegas. All I know is that I want to be with Penn. Every hour. Every day. Every year. And that’s enough for me. It’s more than enough. It’s everything.
“You only get one life, Luna. One stab at this thing called happiness. Why deprive yourself of things you want just because they weren’t given to you the way you hoped for them to come? Life is like a book, a long chain of scenes threaded together by circumstances and fate. You never know how thick or thin your book is, so you better make the most out of every scene, enjoy each chapter.”
If you think you’ve found something good without anything bad in it, it just means you haven’t examined it close enough.”
You made unconditional love conditional for me.
“Even if you have no regard for your own—what about others? What if you run over someone else’s parent? Hurt a child? An elderly woman? Anyone, really. You get behind the wheel, you put everyone at risk, not just yourself.”
“What if tomorrow never comes?” I whispered. “Then, my darling boy, we’ll make the best of today.”
“Because humans are corrupt, and rules are boring.”
Knight Jameson Cole: Quarterback. Prom King. The best looking jackass in town. But also, Knight Jameson Cole: Closeted alcoholic. Adopted son. Gentle soul. And the most pure-hearted man I’d ever known.
“You didn’t do it on purpose. We break things all the time. It’s called life. If you don’t break, you don’t live. You don’t move. You don’t try. You don’t take chances.
“Newsflash, Knight. Life is temporary. Your mom could’ve been perfectly healthy and gotten run over by a truck ten years ago. Just because you take life for granted doesn’t mean it is.”
He wanted to die. I got it. If Luna’s life was in danger, I’d want to go through whatever she was going through, too.
I’d once asked my sister, Emilia, what it felt like. To be normal. To be healthy. To be genetically privileged.
She’d said, “Days tick by, as you expect them to. Like fanning pages in a calendar. You make plans. Sometimes you forget them. Sometimes you keep them. Sometimes cancel them. But you never doubt you can make them. You let things—mundane things, like bad traffic or getting caught in the pouring rain or rude, inconsiderate people—ruin your day, not realizing how precious said day is. How unique. How this day will never come again. No day will look quite like it. And that’s how you look back, years after, wondering where all the time went.”
It was when my husband entered our room that I finally broke down. I was exhausted from being strong. Strong for Emilia. For Lev. For Knight. I knew Dean was in a state no less upset than they were, but with one distinguished difference: he had always been my protector. He’d always had my back. It was inspiring to watch as he’d fought with doctors, sought out specialists from all over the world, and turned every rock, checked every corner, until we’d exhausted our options on how to fight my disease.
I was trapped inside my body, wanting to leap out with my breath still in me and run from it.
“Don’t be scared, my love. I promise I will watch over you, even when you’re there and I’m here. I promise this is not the end. I promise to come look for you in heaven. And if I’m destined to go the other way, I assure you, I’ll find someone to bribe so we can be roommates in hell.”
For anyone who has lost someone, this packs a punch.
“The sun will shine tomorrow, my love. I know.” “Because it must?” I’d asked her. “Because it was the first thing Luna ever signed to me. When I did her braids sixteen years ago, I asked her if she was sad about her mother. She signed that it didn’t matter. That the sun would always see her to another day. And you know what? It did. Smart girl.”
This killed me. The book took such an unexpected emotional turn. This paragraph though, it just hit hard for me.
“Thank you.” My wife had smiled up at me. “For this life.” “Thank you,” I’d answered. “For making me worthy of giving it to you.” I’d promised her I’d be strong, and I was going to be. For her. For me. For them.
Don’t mistake my politeness for weakness.
Maybe sometimes we make people monsters in our heads because we can’t understand them.
