How High We Go in the Dark

by Sequoia Nagamatsu

Everything is connected, she’d say. And I’d tell her, You’re only one person and you only have one life.

You saw a future of dead soil and dead oceans, all of us fighting for our lives.

“what is laughter but a moment of release where pain and memory are washed away?

Perhaps we all need to believe in second chances.

Here, I was in control. I was somebody without a past.

We’d play Twenty Questions and weird relationship board games to help us facilitate the evening—apparently, we’ve never been great at filling the silences.

My engineer father once told me that marriage and who you fall in love with are largely a matter of chance, chemicals, and how far you’re willing to drive.

people who seemed so peripheral to one’s life yet so incredibly important in the absence of Earth.

the postapocalypse doesn’t mean we stop dancing.

“People have forgotten how to care for each other, for themselves. We can’t expect them to care about the world if they don’t care about what’s in front of them,”

sometimes people and places serve a purpose for a finite amount of time to help you think and grow and love and then you move on.

Sometimes hundreds of light-years exist between even the simplest forms of life.