Falling into Place

She wished to be happy, and fell asleep with an entire sky above her.

Because Liz Emerson held so much darkness within her that closing her eyes didn't make much of a difference at all.

Liz looked back and counted the bodies, all those lives she had ruined simply by existing. So she chose to stop existing.

She was tired. Gravity pulled at her more aggressively than usual. When she closed her eyes, she could feel it, dragging her deeper, deeper. I would have pulled her back. I would have saved her from falling, but she didn’t see my hand.

Please," he whispers. "remember the sky.

Gravity is our playmate, momentum is our friend. We are blurs of motion. We are racing, and we are both winning, because we do not race each other. We race the world, and as fast as it rotates, as fast as it revolves, we are faster.

We wonder what lies beyond. One day, she will grow up and imagine death as an angel that will lend her wings, so she can find out. Death, unfortunately, is not in the business of lending wings.

She is human and bound by the same laws of nature—gravity, in particular—as everyone else. Try as she might, she will never grow wings.

Well, hello, darling with the ocean eyes, How many secrets keep us apart? A sea of poems, a field of sighs, Can I cross and return to the start?

She wanted to go back. She wanted to be a little girl again, the one who thought getting high meant being pushed on the swing and pain was falling off her bike.

Funny things, aren't they? People. They only believed in what they could see. Appearances were all that mattered, and no one would ever care what she was like on the inside. No one cared that she was breaking apart.

She would be an object in motion that would stay in motion, even if it meant flattening everything in her path.

But there was something terrifying taking over her thoughts, and it wouldn't leave. Out of seven billion sharing the planet with her, not one of them knew what was going through her head. Not one of them knew that she was lost. Not one of them asked.

I would have pulled her back. I would have saved her from falling, but she didn’t see my hand

It is then, when she releases her need to understand, that everything falls into place.

She had been desperate to feel something, anything. She needed a window, because she had broken her heart throwing it at locked doors.

She finally figure out that she, Liz Emerson, was the equal and opposite reaction. She was the consequence.

They were catalysts, the fingers that tipped the first domino. They started things that grew into nothing things that were much greater than themselves. A touch, a nudge in the wrong direction, and everyone fell down.

it’s never too late to change. Every day is a blank page, and your story has yet to be written.

Drowned out by the sound of his heart throwing itself against his ribcage.

She lives in a world made entirely of sky.

It struck him that perhaps she thought just as many thoughts in a minute as he did, felt just as many emotions, inhaled and exhaled just as he did. And it was then that he began to fall in love with her for the second time, for the same reason that he had picked up his flute again: because he believed in broken things.

He is very much in love with Liz Emerson,and it seems that she will never know.

No one sees how her hands shake as she closes the magazine, lays it down gingerly as though afraid that her trembling will start an earth quake, and make the entire world crumble.

Liz was afraid of silence, and she kept her fears clenched so tightly in her fists that they grew and grew and swallowed her whole.

And suddenly, it’s very clear to her that every action is an interaction, and everything she has ever done has led to something else, and to another something else…

Inertia, force, mass, gravity, velocity, acceleration. . .cause and effect. Liz Emerson doesn't understand any of it. But I do. I understand how we fall. Where we fall. Why we fall. I understand her sadness and loneliness and silence, her shattered heart. It doesn't have to be this way, does it? It wasn't always this way, was it? Stay alive, Liz Emerson, stay alive.

There's more to life than cause and effect.

Her mother's words echoed through her head: love you. People threw them around so easily, as if they were nothing, as if they meant nothing.