The God of Endings

by Jacqueline Holland

Stories, after all, have boundaries, and fear needs nothing more desperately than boundaries.

“You will bloom but never decay,” Grandfather said to me long ago. It’s proved true, and, at times, not particularly helpful. I think I should prefer to be eternally middle-aged and free to rent a car without questions.

Preschool is the briefest imaginable thing. Two years overstuffed with energy, curiosity, momentum. The most buzzingly alive a person will ever be they are at three, four, five years old. Preschool is a line drive, a Slip ’N Slide, a mad dash to something else. Enjoy, but do not get attached. Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow it all slips away to puberty and acne and angst.

The only unpardonable sin is sheltering another from the death of their fear.

It seems, unfortunately, that nothing can protect you from your own mind, your knowledge, your memories.

the helpless horror of watching someone or something you care for suffer far eclipses the pain of suffering yourself.

for some reason, it strikes me as fitting that art should cost the artist dearly, that the most beautiful things made by man should also be poisonous.

“If I did not still love her, it would mean that I had never loved her. Love—real love—cannot stop. It is one of the few things in this world that has no end.”

IT’S a strange thing to suffer in a beautiful city; the beauty of the place is made dark in the mirror of your pain, and your pain is made beautiful in the mirror of the city.

“Well, we children do not like emptying, clearing. We do not want Czernobog’s darkness, only Belobog’s light. Even us very old children. We forget that light, without shadow or variation, is blinding. We malign and fear and slander the Emptier, Czernobog, the Dark One, the god of endings. Perhaps we would do well to wait, like children learning patience, learning trust, and see what fills the space he clears, what light breaks into his darkness.”

Everything, however difficult or complicated or painful, is better than nothing. Though you’re right, it is more frightening.”

What you deserve and what you get: there’s no way to measure them. You get the world and the world gets you, who’s swindling whom?”

But then it’s true for adults too; after all, we’re just the warped remains of imperfectly loved children.

None of us gets the perfect love we ought, but maybe that’s what life is for, to give us time to collect it in bits and pieces, a little here, a little there. Maybe we’re supposed to put it together ourselves slowly.”

Rich people are easily frightened by things money can’t fix.

How presumptuous is the gift of life? What arrogance is implicit in the act of love that calls another into existence? This world, my love, I give it to you. All of it. You’re welcome, and I’m sorry.