Before I Let Go (Skyland, #1)

by Kennedy Ryan

Now, this is joy. I taste it in my laughter as Kassim grabs my hand and tries his best to twirl me around. I feel it in the spray of water on my face when we dance too close to the fountain. It leaps in my chest when I almost fall in, almost topple into a well full of wishes. I fix my eyes on the sky above, a blue-black quilt stitched with stars. With my arms stretched toward infinity, it feels for a moment like worship. Like a collection of sacred seconds consecrated to say thank you for friends and family and hope, that elusive emotion I didn’t realize was such a rare commodity of the heart until I had none. People talk about the stages of grief, but there is a stage of depression—at least for me—where you go from feeling pain so acutely you can’t bear it, to feeling nothing at all. A blessed numbness after debilitating sadness. It’s like laying a thin film of steel over your emotions. So thin it’s diaphanous. You can see everything through it, but nothing actually touches you. I couldn’t feel a thing, but I embraced it because at least I wasn’t feeling pain. At that time, joy didn’t stand a chance, but tonight I feel everything. And it is finally good.

It’s ironic that he remembers me sacrificing my soda and I remembered it being him. I wonder if that’s true of everything and the truth hides somewhere between what we each remember? Reshaping our memories to be what we thought they should. Did I make it better than it was? Did I ever make it worse?