Station Eleven

by Emily St. John Mandel

So this is how it ends, she thought, when the call was over, and she was soothed by the banality of it. You get a phone call in a foreign country, and just like that the man with whom you once thought you’d grow old has departed from this earth.

The Symphony was insufferable, hell was other flutes or other people or whoever had used the last of the rosin or whoever missed the most rehearsals, but the truth was that the Symphony was their only home.

WHAT WAS LOST IN THE COLLAPSE: almost everything, almost everyone, but there is still such beauty.

Yes, it was beautiful. It was the most beautiful place I have ever seen. It was gorgeous and claustrophobic. I loved it and I always wanted to escape.

I repent nothing.

Hell is the absence of the people you long for.

I want to do something remarkable but I don’t know what.

DIALLO: The mystery audience member who knew CPR. He’s in the New York Times obituary. RAYMONDE: He was kind to me. Do you know his name? DIALLO: I’m not sure anyone does.

THIS IS SO SAD

This is my soul and the world unwinding, this is my heart in the still winter air.

What I mean to say is, the more you remember, the more you’ve lost.

Once we lived on an island in the ocean. Once we took the ferry to go to high school, and at night the sky was brilliant in the absence of all these city lights. Once we paddled canoes to the lighthouse to look at petroglyphs and fished for salmon and walked through deep forests, but all of this was completely unremarkable because everyone else we knew did these things too, and here in these lives we’ve built for ourselves, here in these hard and glittering cities, none of this would seem real if it wasn’t for you.

Everyone else died, I walked, I found the Symphony.

it is possible to survive this but not unaltered, and you will carry these men with you through all the nights of your life.

We traveled so far and your friendship meant everything. It was very difficult, but there were moments of beauty. Everything ends. I am not afraid.