Where They Lie (Nora McTavish, #1)

by Joe Hart

The law is one size fits all, while reality is a series of chaotic events we raft through like white water. The difference is some people get handed life jackets while others are told they should’ve learned how to swim better.

None of this is happening. The words of a madman—

Foster children share a lot in common with convicts. They’ve both been taken in and processed by the state. Both placed in environments and situations not of their choosing. And both have “rap sheets” in that their crimes, or someone else’s, have been listed, recorded. A life whittled down to misdeeds and subjections. These rap sheets also include family, friends, and known associates.

We forget how young some people are when they start carrying weight beyond their years, then wonder why they struggle.

Because humans are learning machines. We learn by what’s done to us, not just what we’re taught. We learn to injure and touch and wound what we shouldn’t. We learn to abuse and abandon if we’re hurt and lost.

There comes a time in everyone’s life where they begin wondering what the point is. If they’re making a difference or just treading water. What was the point of work if it only funded a week’s vacation in some paradise where you could only ever be a visitor, never a resident? What good was it to hate waking up on Monday morning only to yearn for Friday night? If purpose became a perk not a prerequisite, what the hell were we even doing?

Good memories for the most part, but always tinged with melancholy. Because there was a negative space ever present. A void where someone else should’ve been.

“Nice to know people will give you their time,” he mused, watching out the window. “The only thing we really have to give, and it’s special. Time’s just another word for love.”

How many brilliant people had fallen under the weight of unattainable desires? When you didn’t have opportunity, hope could become chains.

There is a freedom in anonymity. Liberty in losing yourself in a place that’s yet to be exploited. It purifies, even if we don’t deserve it.

The trick is finding a place so quiet, so full of solitude, you don’t have to think over the din—the noise other minds create. Your own creates enough by itself.

The ones who have survived something and know a new truth.

They’ve been violated in some way, and people watch from their living rooms shaking their heads, glad they don’t understand. I knew I looked like them. Had always belonged to that particular group of refugees moving onward from some smoking tragedy in their past. But it becomes inured in your life—another aspect of who you are. People can get used to anything given enough time. You make as much peace as you can and try to go forward.

No one got to say how another grieved. There was no right or wrong way. There was only the valley of loss and how you made your way out of it. Some never did.

Everyone has something to fight for. But not everyone has someone to fight for them.

There are no words for what we do to each other. No words for what we are. Human beings are the strongest and weakest part of the world. And when they break, they shatter everything around them.