After the Flood

I knew it was sometimes easier to love ghosts than the people who were around you. Ghosts could be perfect, frozen beyond time, beyond reality, the crystal form they’d never been before, the person you needed them to be.

I keep thinking grief feels like climbing a staircase while looking down,” she said. “You won’t forget where you’ve been, but you’ve got to keep rising. It all gets farther away, but it’s all still there. And you’ve only got one way to go and you don’t really want to go on rising, but you’ve got to. And that tightness in your chest doesn’t go away, but you somehow go on breathing that thinner, higher air. It’s like you grow a third lung. Like you’ve somehow gotten bigger when you thought you were only broken.

I had waited so long to prove myself wrong. To prove that I have room in me for everything I’ve lost and will lose, that the room in my heart will grow with loss and not contract. And I hadn’t just found it to be true; I’d made it true. I am not the shards of a broken glass, but the water let loose from it. The uncontainable thing that will not shatter and stay broken.

I have faith," she had said. "But only for every minute out of a hundred. So I act on that one moment even when I'm not in it.

I am not the shards of a broken glass, but the water let loose from it. The uncontainable thing that will not shatter and stay broken.

You know what happens to kids who are abandoned? Who don’t believe they’re worth anyone staying around? It changes how you see yourself. Everyone else is walking around fine and it’s like you have a fucking hole in your chest and the whole world can reach in and touch anything in you. You have no armor. You never feel safe. I’m not just saving her from the Lost Abbots, I’m saving her from that. She . . . she has to know that I’m here for her.

The world will break you, but it’s when you break yourself that you feel you really can’t heal.

Every good thing will return to you, my mother used to say.

I'd ache to flip through the pages of books, to feel the connection of another mind.

If you blame yourself for the bad, credit yourself for the good, too,

You must become someone you haven’t had to be yet.

How?” I asked, my voice hoarse. “How do you go on?” Marjan was silent a moment, watching me. She bit her lip and squinted until her eyes were slits. “You do the hardest thing. The most impossible thing. Again and again.

I hadn’t allowed myself to have a dream in so long it felt foreign, uncomfortable, like a muscle gone weak.

Her scream had that tenor—that tenor of reliving something that shouldn’t have been endured in the first place. I knew it, but I couldn’t bear to have it named to me, where I’d have to acknowledge it.

Gaia?” “There was this theory, over two hundred years ago, called the Gaia hypothesis. Essentially that all living matter on earth works together to create life, to make earth habitable. A regulation among matter to fight disorder. Life can’t exist without fighting disorder.

Pearl observed the world like she was listening to something very far away, like she had a third hand with which she reached out and touched something invisible.

where you’ve been, but you’ve got to keep rising. It all gets farther away, but it’s all still there. And you’ve only got one way to go and you don’t really want to go on rising, but you’ve got to. And that tightness in your chest doesn’t go away, but you somehow go on breathing that thinner, higher air. It’s like you grow a third lung. Like you’ve somehow gotten bigger when you thought you were only broken.

From the water we came and to the water we will return, our lungs always hungering for air, but our hearts beating like waves.

I swear to God, Abran, get your shit together,” I whispered.

Maybe we all were born with trust and then lost it. Maybe we all had to find it again before we left.

Maybe taking responsibility was the only way to lessen the helplessness he had felt that night. That was how I dealt with terror, how I wrestled some semblance of control back into my life.

It was more like my life was an open expanse and I was waiting for something to appear on the horizon, waiting for my life to begin.

For everything to rise above earth, above certain death, to have some part of you that always rises and lets you hover above what you’ve lost.