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there is doom to be found everywhere if doom is what you seek.
“Every punishment you’ve ever subjected anyone to? You do it to yourself every day. Every minute. Your pain is chronic. Your existence is pointless.
“To care at all about anyone or anything means inevitably to suffer.
“To feel the feelings of someone else is to exhaust yourself with double the pain,”
As with any chronic condition, his survival was a matter of becoming more comfortable, not some elusive unreality of being wholly pain-free. The trick was managing it until it no longer bit so angrily or stung.
As if anyone would ever willingly choose to spend any time with themselves.
He always said I had an imagination, that I saw things the way I did because I was making it up. And it’s wild, isn’t it, that I believe him? Because I do, I believe him,” Tristan said, “and that’s the shittiest part, that when I was supposed to be learning how to see the world, how to be part of it, he taught me to be scared all the time. I’m so fucking afraid that I can’t see things clearly unless I go back there, to feeling like maybe I could die. And in the moment where I have to think yes, all right then, I’ll do it—in that moment”—Tristan exhaled—“the hardest moment, the one that until
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he became more aware of how resoundingly he failed to hold up to their status markers. Not in terms of wealth, but something … else. Something Ezra had always lacked. It was the same inauthenticity he smelled on Atlas; that sense of not only belonging, but commanding. It was an aura of certainty, the kind that typically came with privilege, which Ezra had never known how to replicate.
“There’s no proof wormholes even exist, first of all—” There was proof, actually. In a manor house thirty years into the future. Being used by a hyperactive Cuban with a prediabetic dependence on snacks.
Everything was related. This was what nobody seemed to understand. That although some corn-fed family in Iowa might not feel the loss of the Philippines now, they would someday, they would have to, because ecosystems were connected, because life mattered, because nothing in this world could disappear without a trace—
She was an extremely sane woman who had simply had it up to here with everyone who had ignored her for thirty literal years.
