Thalia

“We lay on our backs on hot sand and baked in the sun. Salt-crusted, preserved. Later, in the darkness of the green dome I felt his hand brush against my thigh, and with it the same electric pulse of need there had always been. Silence descended; everything stopped; I didn’t move, afraid to ignite a want that wouldn’t be satisfied, or lose a hope I’d held on to forever. He hesitated for a long moment, his hand stretching hot against my cold skin, a moment that hung between us in an unanswered question.

Days passed. Clouds moved in from the south-west, white rolling cumuli disappearing inland. Winds changed direction: damp and light from the west; dry and cooling from the east; colder from the north-west, carrying hints of another season soon behind; then gently from the south, summer not quite yet spent. The heat reflected off the flat rocks, less jagged than those that surrounded them in the cove. We dried clothes on them, sat the stove flat on them to cook limpets, cracked an egg on them in the hope that it might fry, but when it didn’t, scraped it up and scrambled it, picking out bits of sand and grit. We lay on them, crisping to leathery brown. Bodies that fourteen months earlier were hunched and tired, soft and pale, were now lean and tanned, with a refound muscularity that we’d thought lost forever. Our hair was fried and falling out, our nails broken, clothes worn to a thread, but we were alive. Not just breathing through the thirty thousand or so days between life and death, but knowing each minute as it passed, swirling around in an exploration of time. The rock gave back the heat as it followed the arc of the sun, gulls called in differing tones as the tide left the shore and then returned, my hands wrinkled with age and my thighs changed to a new shape with passing miles, but when he pulled me to him and kissed me with an urgency that wasn’t in doubt, with a fervour that wouldn’t fail, time turned. I was ten million minutes and nineteen years ago, I was in the bus stop about to go back to his house, knowing his parents weren’t home, I was a mother of toddlers stealing moments in a walk-in wardrobe, we were us, every second of us, a long-marinated stew of life’s ingredients. We were everything we wanted to be and everything we didn’t. And we were free, free to be all those things, and stronger because of them. Skin on longed-for skin, life could wait, time could wait, death could wait. This second in the millions of seconds was the only one, the only one that we could live in. I was home, there was nothing left to search for, he was my home.”
― Raynor Winn, The Salt Path

“My skill at being no trouble to anyone also kicked in early. I was sitting on my mom's lap during a church service, and as one-year-olds are wont, I was fussing, and jerking and generally moving around a bunch. Somehow, I managed to clock my head on the pew in front of us; the bonk of my skull hitting wood was so loud everything stopped. The congregation held its collective breath to see how much bloody murder I was prepared to scream. And then, nothing. Mom said she held me tightly, quietly saying, "Shhh.. Shhh.." This because one of her favorite stories about me. As if I'd passed some kind of cosmic test in which I had maintained decorum and invisibility.”
― Geena Davis, Dying of Politeness: A Memoir

“His take on the world was his; that didn't mean I had to mold myself to fit into it. This was an astonishing revelation to me. I'd spent my entire life trying to massage everyone's feelings, walking on eggshells, subjugating my own wishes to keep peace. I was far too interested in pleasing other people, in keeping them happy, and trying to figure out continually what they'd like me to be.”
― Geena Davis, Dying of Politeness: A Memoir

“I knew then that I was one with everything, the worms in the soil, clouds in the sky; I was part of it all, within everything. The wild was never something to fear or hide from. It was my safe place, the thing I ran to.”
― Raynor Winn, The Salt Path