Thrust

by Lidia Yuknavitch

The leaving of a place carried sorrow as well as relief, and the coming here carried both as well.

“Evil is just live going a different direction,” she said. “People need to learn to understand backward better. Words. Objects. Time. People get stuck too easily.”

Most humans were stupid; the rest of them suffered from a melancholia that was something like an irrational addiction to nostalgia, or so it seemed to him. A decidedly human ailment. They were addicted to dead things.

Children are what was or is or will be the best of us.

Listen, my love . . . you can do something quite useful. You can turn time. You can move forward and backward. You can become a free-flowing form in motion, a bridge between being and beyond-being. You are no one’s hero. You are a living moment between time and water.

“Can I please help?” Laisvė felt infinitesimal. Not in size. In soul.

“I travel by water. Backward and forward in time,” Laisvė said.

A world of words and images scrolls through my head: migration histories. The face of Bertrand. The voice of Bal. My brother as a baby. The laughs of worms.

What it amounts to is, I met that young woman, I met that girl, out of order. Stories don’t care how we tell them. Stories take any shape they want. Not all stories happen with a beginning, a middle, and an end. I’ve come to understand maybe they never do. End, that is.

Nostalgia is a funny thing. At certain moments in life, it can hit you so hard that your whole body vibrates with it, almost like you’re on the verge of time travel. Lilly’s skin began to tingle—with the history of the place, and with her own memory of the last time she’d been there.

Lilly sat on the plush couch and thought about how many skins a woman must shed in order to survive a lifetime.