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No one could survive this. How could anyone, human or Fey, live this way? Feeling so much? I just wanted to rest.
The past was jagged glass. But I was drunk on the way it tore me up.
I didn’t want him to hold himself back. Self-control made a soul tired. I was sick of it.
How much does a memory weigh? Too much to carry alone. Tisaanah looked into my eyes and took my hands.
“Do you think your regret is equal to my suffering?” “No.” “Then what good is your regret to me?” Now, I understood this expression—sadness. “None,” he said. “My regret is worthless.”
Once I’d thought that love was the sum of its parts, the result of a collection of traits and experiences, like a structure steadily built from bricks layered over bricks. If you collect enough of them, there is love. But that had been a child’s view of the world. The bricks were important, but what they created was more than just a pile of stones. It was the difference between a house and a home. If the building burns down, something is still there that makes it home. If the memories are gone, something is still there that makes it love.
“I’m not much for words, so I’ll only say this once. If you ever have to guess what I want, or what is best for me, it is you. Alright? I have made that decision already. I do not make it lightly. Don’t disrespect that by claiming that you know better for me than I do. I have made bad decisions before. But you are not, never have been, and never will be one of them. It is always you.”
Perhaps we didn’t need gods to find our place in something larger. Perhaps it already existed in us.
“Caduan. I despise what he is doing in the name of his vengeance. I despise what he is doing to the world, to all of us. But I understand him. At times, that seems like cruelest part of this of all. We all feel the same things, and we will still die trying to kill each other for it.”
Grief was not a virus to be cured and expelled. It was a chronic condition that would shadow him forever.
know how greedy tragedy is. It consumes everything. It consumes hope; it consumes faith. And in the absence of hope, the only thing that seems worth doing is nothing.
“Do not fear death, my daughter. We all walk with one foot in each world. There is beauty in impermanence. And what sad lives we would live, if we never loved anything we would lose.”
He spoke so calmly, but it was the sort of calm that balanced on the razor’s edge of sanity, promising collapse.
Butterflies came from nothing. I wasn’t afraid of being nothing—of being pieces of so many incomplete things. I knew who I was.
“You have survived, my daughter. Now live.”
We do not have to tell our children about our pasts today, or tomorrow, or the next day. But one day, our past and our future will collide. For some reason, this thought is terrifying to me. We have done so much to separate our children from the worst parts of our past. And yet, at the same time, everything we do is driven by it. We have taken the hardest parts of our lives and turned them into something great.
