All the Water in the World

Greed and hope aren't opposites. Greed and hope are twins grabbing for the same thing, one in fear and one in faith.

But greed like that didn't start out bad. What alters wanting is what's behind it. Greed and hope aren't opposites. Greed and hope are twins grabbing for the same thing, one in fear and one in faith.

Bodies of people we love die, we leave them. Something of them remains in us, something we have to keep like we would a fossil, a story no one remembers, a Logbook. I knew that a place is just a body, no longer alive without the people that ensoul it, but it still hurt to go.

If there was light here, there could be light in other places. If there was power in me, I could spread it. I could let that power glow and make myself a beacon.

I told her I thought about her every day since Hancock, when Esther told me, in a room that smelled of blood, that what I’d longed for was real. She said she’d come back, and maybe I’d be ready to go with her. And now it is that year, and she’s in a bedroom upstairs, and I am ready. You cannot always be in Leningrad. You are allowed to hope for something that doesn’t just save, something that builds.

You cannot always be in Leningrad. You are allowed to hope for something that doesn’t just save, something that builds.

Thinking that the world has picked only you for tragedy is looking for mustard seeds. There is the weather and there is death. You can’t control them, and you can’t fool yourself that your name is the only one they know. They have everyone’s names in their mouths.

And there is a Catskill eagle in some souls that can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again and become invisible in the sunny spaces. And even if he for ever flies within the gorge, that gorge is in the mountains; so that even in his lowest swoop the mountain eagle is still higher than other birds upon the plain, even though they soar.... I think it means that for some people things are harder and they don't know it. But then also, things re more beautiful because they are harder, and they don't know that either.

All holding hands, all heading down and away. We ran together. We didn't stop. We held on.

What alters wanting is what’s behind it. Greed and hope aren’t opposites. Greed and hope are twins grabbing for the same thing, one in fear and one in faith.

When I missed the sea, I could lean my face into another person - with worry or dangerous joy or grieving - and feel their tide. The World As It Is is only a furious tide of people, linked by blood and tears and sweat, a push toward each other we can't stem.

One night on the roof of Amen, tending to the fire that we kept going in a scavenged washing machine drum, I asked Keller why he chose bugs and not God. He laughed, shook his head, brushed ash from his hands, scratched the beard growing in on his soft jawline. 'I have everything of the infinite in insects, Nonie. Do you know how many there are?' 'No. How many?' 'Nine hundred thousand kinds named, little warrior, maybe thirty million unidentified...we thought there were maybe ten quintillion individual insects alive on the planet. With this weather, even factoring in the extinctions, I'm sure there are lots more than that'. He laughed. 'Largest biomass there is on the Earth'.

Leaving [home] was walking away from the side of a grave. The person wasn't there, only the body under the soil. Bodies of people we love die, we leave them. Something of them remains in us, something we have to keep like we would a fossil, a story no one remembers, a Logbook. I knew that a place is just a body, no longer alive without the people that ensoul it, but it still hurt to go.

Sometimes what loks like shelter is only a menace.

Lost people don’t know that what it means to be a human is to care about other humans. They forgot

But her light went out, and we became untethered. All it took was the storm to knock us free.

Mother told me it was slow at first, the way the world changed. You could forget about it. People talked like you could fix it. A storm would pass, and they’d put things back together. Or one day there was no gas, and you learned to live without your car. “You learned to live without bananas, without airplanes,” that’s how Mother said it. She said it like losing taught you lessons you needed, until you were happy to have a day with fresh water in your apartment and a bath.

It was ours, the water at the farm, but it was no different from any other water, every drop of moisture that fell since there were only protozoa, trilobites, orthocones. It was inside every single human being. When I missed the sea, I could lean my face into another person—with worry or dangerous joy or grieving—and feel their tide. The World As It Is is only a furious tide of people, linked by blood and tears and sweat, a push toward each other we can’t stem. Water was over Mother’s grave, beside Father’s, under the boats, in my blood and the blood of everyone I loved. I felt it all. I felt the weight of all the water in the world.

There wasn't much left, but in Leningrad in the siege in the war the curators stayed and ate restorer's paste to stay alive and wrapped the dead and laid them in the basement until the thaw and chipped the ice off the paintings while the siege went on outside. All that mattered was that the art remained. Even if they could have run away across Lake Ladoga and into the edges of the taiga forest and hidden with what they knew, they wouldn't have left. They belonged to the art and the art belonged to them and it was a sacred duty. But so was the vision of what it would be one day when the siege was over and the windows replaced and the broken walls repaired and the museum alive again for everyone, for the world that mattered, the one they wanted.

You don’t know they’ll be white. Maybe the Cloisters is full of Black people, and you’re the right person to knock on the door.” I could hear a cross laugh in Keller’s quiet voice. “I’m pretty sure that the people who set up shop in a castle are going to be white. Museums: last refuge of the ruling class.

When someone loves you, they become your sea.

Sometimes what looks like shelter is only a menace.

The museum was perfect for me, dark and quiet, organized and private, like the world inside my head that no one ever saw.

Greed and hope aren’t opposites. Greed and hope are twins grabbing for the same thing, one in fear and one in faith.