The Hiding Place

by C.J. Tudor

Life can be canceled at any moment, with no warning, no refund, no matter how far along you are in the journey.

People say time is a great healer. They’re wrong. Time is simply a great eraser. It rolls on and on regardless, eroding our memories, chipping away at those great big boulders of misery until there’s nothing left but sharp little fragments, still painful but small enough to bear. Broken hearts don’t mend. Time just takes the pieces and grinds them to dust.

Creeping cold. A phrase I haven’t thought about since I was a kid. The type of cold that wraps itself around your bones and settles, like a lump of ice, in your intestines.

not fate exactly, but a sequence of events that are unavoidable.

Facebook is the place where people with no friends in real life keep in touch with people they’d never want to be friends with in real life.

That’s the problem with life. It never gives you a heads-up. Never offers you even the slightest clue that this might be an important moment. You might want to take some time, drink it in. It never lets you know that something is worth holding on to until it’s gone.

The problem is, if you let kids be kids, then before you know it they’re smearing their faces in pigs’ blood, pushing each other off the edge of cliffs and smashing their mates’ heads in with rocks. Our job as teachers, adults and parents is to stop, at every level, kids being kids, or they’ll tear the fucking world down around our ears.

Grief is personal. It isn’t something you can share, like a box of chocolates. It is yours and yours alone. A spiked steel ball chained to your ankle. A coat of nails around your shoulders. A crown of thorns. No one else can feel your pain. They cannot walk in your shoes because your

shoes are full of broken glass and every time you try and take a step forward it rips your soles to bloody shreds. Grief is the worst kind of torture and it never ends. You have dibs on that dungeon for the rest of your life.

A reader cracks the spine, thumbs the pages, absorbs every word and nuance. You might not be able to judge a book by its cover, but you can definitely judge the person who owns the book.

“We’re all still children inside. The same fears, the same joys. We just get taller, and better at hiding things.”

“Sometimes, some places, like people, have to want to be found.”

“To stop history repeating itself.” “You can’t. That’s what history does. We like to pretend we learn from our mistakes, but we don’t. We always think it will be different this time. And it never is.”

Because there are things worse than death. Because what comes back isn’t always what left.

“I’m a weird sort of human. But weird isn’t always bad. Remember that.”

shadows are never just shadows. They are the deepest part of the darkness. And the deepest part of the darkness is where the monsters hide.