nathan’s Reviews > We Do Not Part > Status Update

Like her body had been sliced down the middle by a scalpel, an endless spew of blood-soaked memories.

I thought of her as a living ghost.

Dreams are terrifying things. No—they’re humiliating. They reveal things about you that you weren’t even aware of.

Was there such a thing as wanting to see when all that remained of you was your shadow?

Her eyes glistened with soundless tears, as if all the warm affection she’d stored for me over the last twenty years was seeping out at once.

I’ve come to die, I think from the depths of my fever. I’ve come here to die. To be cut open, riddled with holes, strangled, burned. To this house as it is about to breathe fire and collapse in on itself. To lie alongside these felled logs, these heaped fragments of a giant’s shattered body.

Earth, now a glacial globe, turns on its axis with an ear-splitting screech. Continents covered in churning, cascading lava have instantly turned to ice. Thousands of birds flock over the suddenly eternally unapproachable surface. They fall asleep as they glide. Coming to, they flap their wings. Then slice through the air, glinting, like skate blades.

It was like he lived in two worlds. The room would be dark but he’d squint his eyes to look at me, as if he saw me with one eye but saw something else too with his other eye, a light that lay far beyond me.

Everything I have ever experienced is made crystalline. Nothing hurts any more. Hundreds upon thousands of moments glitter in unison, like snowflakes whose elaborate shapes are in full view. How this is possible, I can’t say. My every pain and joy, all my deep-rooted sorrows and loves, shine, not as an amalgam but as a whole comprised of distinct singularities, glowing together as one giant nebula.

Faces appear to me in my fading consciousness. Not the faces of dead strangers but of people who are living, albeit far away on the mainland. They are exhilaratingly clear. Vivid memories play out before me. In no particular order, and without context. Like a thousand dancers spilling on to the stage at once to each perform a different movement. Their bodies, suspended in their poses, shimmer like crystals.