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I think love’s kiss kills our heart of flesh.
I don’t have a name anymore. Hardly any of us do. We lose them like car keys, forget them like anniversaries.
I miss my own and I mourn for everyone else’s, because I’d like to love them, but I don’t know who they are.
Once you’ve arrived at the end of the world, it hardly matters which route you took.
There is a chasm between me and the world outside of me. A gap so wide my feelings can’t cross it. By the time my screams reach the other side, they have dwindled into groans.
I can’t explain the suffocating silence that hangs over our world, cutting us off from each other like prison-visit Plexiglas. Prepositions are painful, articles are arduous, adjectives are wild overachievements.
We’ve bleached their brains, robbed them of breath, but they still cling to the cliff edge. They resist our curse for as long as they possibly can.
Foster kids not giving up hope. Innocence. The belief that we are taught things like racism and violence, they are not inherent. Imagination and music and love are life.
The grin is not mine to share anymore, and I know this, I have accepted the way things are and the way things are going to be, even if she hasn’t and won’t.
Being alive and feeling alive are two different things. Some are both (julie, Nora, Perry's dad, early Perry), some are only one ( older perry, M, arguably Grigio) and some are neither,(grigio, the boneys). R is making the transition from nothing to everything.
Every time I go into the city, I bring back one thing that catches my eye.
Why does R collect items from the living? The past memory, nostalgia? These are items from a different time. He hoards them on his airplane. Unconventional. Does this reflect his desire for life? Like an addict catching a glimpse of clarity, or a foster kid letting souvenirs remind him of different times and places?
In the airport parking garage, there is a classic Mercedes convertible that I’ve been playing with for several months.
There are many types of travel and symbols for travel in this book. Cars, planes, walking, the escalators. Movement is freedom and independence. The grounded airplane and the escalators are a symbol of " going but going nowhere" just like the zombies. The citadel is trying to expand its boarders, but Grigio stops it. A parallel to the airport boneys.
The new hunger demands sacrifice. It demands human suffering as the price for our pleasures, meager and cheap as they are.
Once again the absurdity of my secret thoughts overwhelms me, and I want to crawl out of my skin, escape my ugly, awkward flesh and be a skeleton, naked and anonymous.
Even now, here, in the darkest and strangest of places with the most macabre of company, this music moves her and her life pulses hard.
I dream my necrotic cells shrugging off their lethargy, inflating and lighting up like Christmas deep in my dark core.
Either way, I feel the flatline of my existence disrupting, forming heartbeat hills and valleys.
I want to change my punctuation. I long for exclamation marks, but I’m drowning in ellipses.
On our right: the dark openings of empty boarding tunnels, once alive with eager travelers on their way to see the world, expand their horizons, find love and fame and fortune. On our left: the blackened wreckage of a Dreamliner.
How can I possibly explain this to her in words? The slow death of Quixote. The abandoning of quests, the surrendering of desires, the settling in and settling down that is the inevitable fate of the Dead.
Music is life! It’s physical emotion—you can touch it! It’s neon ecto-energy sucked out of spirits and switched into sound waves for your ears to swallow.
“All the shitty stuff people do to themselves… it can all be the same thing, you know? Just a way to drown out your own voice. To kill your memories without having to kill yourself.”
this fumbling, stumbling supplicant… was I built on the foundations of my old life, or did I rise from the grave a blank slate? How much of me is inherited, and how much is my own creation? Questions that were once just idle musings have begun to feel strangely urgent.
They keep trying and trying but the beauty of their love only drives me deeper.
Addiction
“There are a thousand kinds of life and death across the whole metaphysical spectrum, not to mention the metaphorical. You don’t want to stay dead for the rest of your life, do you?”
The brilliant truth and the inescapable lie, sitting side by side just like Julie and I.
Can I have both? Can I survive in this doomed world and still love Julie, who dreams above it?
There on the hot white roof of humanity’s last outpost, we look out over our rapidly, hopelessly, irretrievably changing world, and we sing: Nothing’s gonna change my world. Nothing’s gonna change my world.
never wake up. How could anyone expect to? You drop your tiny, helpless mind into a bottomless well, crossing your fingers and hoping that when you pull it out on its flimsy fishing wire it hasn’t been gnawed to bones by nameless beasts below.
“Julie,” I say yet again, as if this is an irrefutable argument. And in a way, it is. That one word, a fully fleshed name.
For however many months or years I’ve been here, I’ve never thought of these other creatures walking around me as people. Human, yes, but not people.
“No,” I say to the ceiling. “I don’t want to die.” As I say it, I realize I’ve just broken my syllable record.
“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.” She strikes a pose and grins. “Cheese!”
I sigh inside, so exhausted by these ugly questions, but when did a monster ever deserve its privacy?
I’ve been gastronomically celibate since the day I met her.
“How can you change? If we all start from the same blank slate, what makes you diverge?” “Maybe we’re not blank. Maybe the debris of our old lives still shapes us.” “But we don’t remember those lives. We can’t read our diaries.” “It doesn’t matter. We are where we are, however we got here. What matters is where we go next.” “But can we choose that?” “I don’t know.”
What does it mean that my past is a fog but my present is brilliant, bursting with sound and color?
You’re going to be strong and beautiful and brilliant, and you’re going to live forever. You’re going to change the world.
A month ago there was nothing on Earth I missed, enjoyed, or longed for. I knew I could lose everything and not feel anything, and I rested easy in that knowledge. But I’m growing tired of easy things.
“Her name is Julie.”
A fresh canvas is unfurling in front of me. What do I paint on it? What’s the first hue to splash on this blank field of gray?
if they think they see something bigger here than a boy chasing a girl, then they can help, and we’ll see what happens when we say yes while this rigor mortis world screams no.
“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.”
R can't remember the past before dying, but he starts to hope when he meets Julie, and now he can remember everything he's done since he's been around her.
The moment the lights went out, everyone stopped pretending.
Just because he’s… whatever he is? I mean, isn’t ‘zombie’ just a silly name we came up with for a state of being we don’t understand? What’s in a name, right?
I get about three feet off the ground before I realize that although I’m now capable of running, speaking, and maybe falling in love, climbing is still a ways down the road for me.
“You said… the plane’s not… its own world.” Her grin falters. “What?” “Can’t… float above… the mess.”
don’t understand it, sir. What’s the point of trying to fix a world we’re in so briefly? Where’s the meaning in all that work if it’s just going to disappear? Without any warning? A fucking brick on the head?”
“The world that birthed that story is long gone, all its people are dead, but it continues to touch the present and future because someone cared enough about that world to keep it. To put it in words. To remember it.”
Why do I want to know the names and functions of all the beautiful structures I’ve spent my years violating? Because I don’t deserve to keep them anonymous. I want the pain of knowing them, and by extension myself: who and what I really am. Maybe with that scalpel, red-hot and sterilized in tears, I can begin to carve out the rot inside me.
“It’s not about keeping up the population, it’s about passing on who we are and what we’ve learned, so things keep going. So we don’t just end. Sure it’s selfish, in a way, but how else do our short lives mean anything?”
