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I smile, and feel ancient. The
A sky is a sky is a sky, and yet here, somehow, it’s more.
I’m not sure I’ll get another chance and I don’t know how to force the world into a shape I can manage.
We’d read while we balanced on the low rock walls that Seamus Heaney made famous in his poetry.
we loved each other with brands to our names and bodies and souls.
The midnight sun has turned the world indigo and something about the quality of the light reminds me of the land where I was raised, that special Galway blue.
so I reach instead for poetry, for Mary Oliver and her wild geese and her animal bodies loving what they love, and even that is difficult.
The long snaking curl of an orange being peeled in one skillful piece: that is my brain. What about Byron, the heart will break—no, maybe Shelley, what are all these kissings worth—no, Poe, then, I lie down by the side of my darling, my darling—
“You all right, love?” he asks me, the first words he’s spoken to me since the night we met. “Look at her face,” Mal says, and as they all clock my expression, whatever it is, they crack up laughing. Even Léa is chuckling, though Anik only rolls his eyes. Ennis smiles as he passes me, clapping me on the shoulder. “It’s got ahold of you now.”
“There is pleasure in the pathless woods. There is rapture on the lonely shore. There is society where none intrudes, by the deep sea, and music in its roar.” I smile. “Byron.”
“Do you not see how necessary a world of pains and troubles is to school an intelligence and make it a soul?”
We ate the birds,” he says. “We ate them. We wanted their songs to flow up through our throats and burst out of our mouths, and so we ate them. We wanted their feathers to bud from our flesh. We wanted their wings, we wanted to fly as they did, soar freely among the treetops and the clouds, and so we ate them. We speared them, we clubbed them, we tangled their feet in glue, we netted them, we spitted them, we threw them onto hot coals, and all for love, because we loved them. We wanted to be one with them.” There is silence in the enormous hall. He is small, down there behind his lectern. And
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“In the 1600s the Bermuda petrel, of the Procellariidae family,
There’s a compass in my heart that leads me not to true north but to true sea.
it’s simply remembering what it feels like to love creatures that aren’t human. A nameless sadness, the fading away of the birds. The fading away of the animals. How lonely it will be here, when it’s just us.
He said Franny Stone makes choices and the universe bends. She makes her own designs and always has; she is a force of nature and he the quiet thing that looks on and loves her for it, even then, still now.
I feel her deep sense of home. I can feel it in the earth, too, when I get out of the car and walk upon the rocks. It’s in the sky and the roaring ocean and the keening of the wind, it’s in the way she strides over her land and into her lighthouse; she owns this place and it owns her, tangible and unarguable. What must it be like to be bound so deeply and willingly to a place?
she watches my face like it holds the secrets of the universe.
It isn’t fair to be the kind of creature who is able to love but unable to stay.
in that way that nobody ever thinks the things they love will end.
From a letter Niall once wrote me: I am only the second love of your life. But what kind of moron would be jealous of the sea?
“What if you’ve a lot to apologize for?” “Once is enough for anything.”
that we are incomprehensibly brief sparks, just as the animals are, that we are no more important than they are, no more worthy of life than any living creature. That in our self-importance, in our search for meaning, we have forgotten how to share the planet that gave us life.
“They’ve declared the crow extinct.”
“But the rest, Franny. Everything else. What happens when the last of the terns die? Nothing will ever be as brave again.”
“It was a wasting thing. She deteriorated quickly, and decided I must leave her.” “Why?” “Because in her mind we existed somewhere sacred and she couldn’t let that be ruined. She didn’t want me to see her … lessen. It was about dignity, I think. About allowing the thing we had to remain intact. She wanted me to go back to the sea, so at least one of us could live.” “And you left?”
“I know it will take a long time for you to trust me again, but—” “I trust you implicitly.”
I’ll love you no matter where on this earth you are.
he says, my husband, changing my life, “There’s a difference between wandering and leaving. In truth, you’ve never once left me.” A gust of air beneath my unfurling wings and I am up, weightless, soaring. I could never love anyone more. And in the same moment comes a terrible awareness. He’s opened the cage door I closed on myself and now I’ll fly, I’ll have to.
and for a split second I want nothing but to destroy myself and so that’s what I do— “Fran—” Impact.
It’s the wilderness within that demands I survive.
and I realize that even though Niall believed his mother was never really able to love him, here is the proof: keeping all these treasures so perfectly preserved for all these years.
only agreed to keep it because she wanted me to be left with something when she breaks free.
If there are terns left, and it’s possible, and not too difficult, I would like my ashes to be scattered where they fly.
Because it seems to me, suddenly, that if it’s the end, really and truly, if you’re making the last migration not just of your life but of your entire species, you don’t stop sooner. Even when you’re tired and starved and hopeless. You go farther.
For you, and for promises, and for a life that was given to fate but could not comprehend your death’s inclusion in that.
