Let the Great World Spin

by Colum McCann

The sunset was the color of muscle, pink and striated gray. Arson.

“You know, when you’re young, God sweeps you up. He holds you there. The real snag is to stay there and to know how to fall. All those days when you can’t hold on any longer. When you tumble. The test is being able to climb up again.

We bring home with us when we leave. Sometimes it becomes more acute for the fact of having left.

Some kids were dancing on the corners. Their bodies in flux. Like they had discovered something entirely new about themselves, shaking it through like a sort of faith.

Had to go along with eyes downcast. A woman of two shoes.

The simple things come back to us. They rest for a moment by our ribcages then suddenly reach in and twist our hearts a notch backward.

There is something that happens to the mind in moments of terror. Perhaps we figure it’s the last we’ll ever have and we record it for the rest of our long journey. We take perfect snapshots, an album to despair over. We trim the edges and place them in plastic. We tuck the scrapbook away to take out in our ruined times.

Ciaran tapped his fingers absently on the dashboard. It looked like the music had entered him and was bouncing around.

There are rocks deep enough in this earth that no matter what the rupture, they will never see the surface.

The thing about love is that we come alive in bodies not our own.

She read in a high African singsong that I guess came down along the line from Ghana long ago, something that she made American, but tied us to a home we’d never seen.

I gave them all the truth and none of the honesty.

They were old and ruined and held each other’s hands as if they were just one piece.

Some people think love is the end of the road, and if you’re lucky enough to find it, you stay there. Other people say it just becomes a cliff you drive off, but most people who’ve been around awhile know it’s just a thing that changes day by day, and depending on how much you fight for it, you get it, or you hold on to it, or you lose it, but sometimes it’s never even there in the first place.

Listening to these people is like listening to trees—sooner or later the tree is sliced open and the watermarks reveal their age.

The only thing worth grieving over, she said, was that sometimes there was more beauty in this life than the world could bear.