The Library of Shadows

by Rachel Moore

She knew alone a little too well. Alone carved out a canyon in her chest, deep grooves of a river run dry. She didn’t know how to fill it back up. She wasn’t sure she even wanted to, just for it to empty again.

There is life, there is death, and there is love—the greatest of these is love.

For someone who died before using a toaster, he sure thought he was the coolest thing since sliced bread.

There is life, there is death, and there is love.’” Somehow, Este knew what would come next. “‘The greatest of these is love,’” they finished together.

“When you love someone, it’s like building a library and filling the shelves. It doesn’t matter how many years it’s been since Austen wrote Emma or Fitzgerald wrote This Side of Paradise. We can still pull them from the bookcases and dive back into the words, the same as the day they were written. All the years and memories are still right here, cataloged inside us.”

Could it be enough if all they ever had was almost—almost touches, almost together, almost real?

“Life and death together,” Mateo read, “create the complete human experience—no one without the other. What, then, perseveres? Like an oath sworn in blood, love ties the living to the dead, for you cannot know darkness without first knowing light.”

Este’s eyes locked on the shape of his lips, the vowels and the hard consonants, like she would find all the answers she ever needed on them.

It wouldn’t be so bad, an eternity like this with him: crisp October breezes tapping at the windowpanes, wool-socked toes padding across polished floors, dawns and twilights running together like watercolors.

You cannot know darkness without first knowing light.

Maybe sepia-toned nostalgia was its own type of haunting. The ache of missing something you could never have again.

She’d assumed that if no one could be hers forever, they didn’t need to be hers at all.

“I don’t want to know another life without you in it.”

in another version of reality, she wanted them to spend fall break in France with her classmates, sipping cappuccinos and debating which Gilded Age writer was superior. She should tell him that she wanted them to have gray hair and laugh lines and all the quiet moments that came between. She should tell him that even though she was never supposed to know him, knowing him made her a better version of herself. An Este who wasn’t afraid of the dark crevices of her heart. An Este who learned it was possible to hurt and hope at the same time.

“There is life, there is death, and there is love—the greatest of these is love.”

What burned, come dawn, will not be lost. What buried roots will grow, and when the ink fades, we will see what only love returns.

“Did you know a kiss at the Hesper Fountain is supposed to mean your love will last forever?” she asked, tilting her head back to meet his gaze. He hummed. “And do you believe that?” Este smiled when she said yes. She kissed him, warm and sweet and soft, and she’d keep kissing him until their hair grayed, until their skin wrinkled, until dust gathered on the bookshelves. Eventually, they’d become nothing more than sun-faded ink, a final line in her favorite story, one she was no longer afraid to write.