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Once you’ve arrived at the end of the world, it hardly matters which route you took.
I grab my stomach again. “Feel empty. Feel . . . dead.” He nods. “Marr . . . iage.”
Quod tu es, ego fui, quod ego sum, tu eris. What you are, I once was. What I am, you will become.
Are my words ever actually audible, or do they just echo in my head while people stare at me, waiting? I want to change my punctuation. I long for exclamation marks, but I’m drowning in ellipses.
“You should always be taking pictures, if not with a camera then with your mind. Memories you capture on purpose are always more vivid than the ones you pick up by accident.”
“Because it’s absurd,” he snaps, and the mood of the room suddenly shifts. “You can water and prune a plant but you cannot ‘love’ a plant.” Julie opens her mouth to speak, then shuts it. “It’s a meaningless decoration. It sits there consuming time and resources, and then one day it decides to die, no matter how much you watered it. It’s absurd to attach an emotion to something so brief and pointless.”
“A whole book for just one person,” Nora says, looking at me. “Could that ever be worth it?”
“There’s no benchmark for how life’s ‘supposed’ to happen, Perry. There is no ideal world for you to wait around for. The world is always just what it is now, and it’s up to you how you respond to it.”
“My mom used to say that’s why we have memory. And the opposite of memory—hope. So things that are gone can still matter. So we can build off our pasts and make futures.” She twirls the leaf in front of her face, back and forth. “Mom said life only makes any sense if we can see time how God does. Past, present, and future all at once.”
We cast our votes and raised our leaders, charming men and women with white teeth and silver tongues, and we shoved our many hopes and fears into their hands, believing those hands were strong because they had firm handshakes. They failed us, always. There was no way they could not fail us—they were human, and more importantly, so were we.
I shrug, deciding that this gesture, while easy to abuse, does have its place. It may even be vital vocabulary in a world as unspeakable as ours.
I would like my life to be a movie so I could cut to a montage. A quick sequence of shots set to some trite pop song would be much easier to endure than the two grueling hours the girls spend trying to convert me, to change me back into what’s widely considered human.
But I’m not afraid of the skeletons in Julie’s closet. I look forward to meeting the rest of them, looking them hard in the eye, giving them firm, bone-crunching handshakes.
