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how strangely people behaved when they were lost.
Fathers leave in all sorts of ways. Some of them leave in the dark. Some leave only in their heads, while their bodies remain, staring at the world around them forever distantly. Others fade out over time, like an old photo rubbed raw. Many, gone in an instant.
He looked at her. “I am the last of them.” “You have my condolences for this loss, warrior.” She bowed her head. “I hope that their end was mighty.” “I’ve yet to witness an end that was,” he said.
“I have lived a long time,” she said. “And the longer I live, the more it surprises me, and saddens me, how wise the young must become to live in this world.”
If only there were a way to hold a moment in your hands and keep it alive forever.
Blame is an endless circle.
“I ate a god,” he said. Araya’s eyes widened. “We have only just met,” she said, “so forgive me for saying that that does not sound like a very wise decision.”
There were times in your life when you wished your mind could be read, or tuned to like some frequency on a radio. Times when you did not want to do the work of speaking your piece. Like when you and Jadi fought that day shortly after your lola died, scrappy, bruising, and afterward you knew it was your fault, the fight, but you didn’t know how to tell your friend that you were sorry. How easy it would’ve been, if you could’ve just opened a door and let him walk inside and see the mess for himself.
And sometimes you wonder, even now, if maybe your mind has a mind of its own.
It was a tickly feeling, to know that there was someone close by who liked him. But by then he knew better than to expect the best of such situations. He was too burned by the past to make the first move.
We are called to our parents like sirens.
But perhaps now you understand that you are not a representative. That like the spear’s journey through time, much of this dance is dictated by chance. You are merely, crucially, no one but yourself, as anyone else is themselves—mere stewards, gifting recursively over the divide of time this spear, that memory, to the people and the place from which they had come—and who, in turn, gift back to you your strange, and sad, and wide-eyed futures.
