Green Angel

My grief was cold. It was nothing to share. It was nothing to speak about, nothing to feel.

I didn’t want to be prideful anymore. I wanted to be as hard as and brittle as the stones I carted into the woods. Stones that could not feel or cry or see. I wished not to feel anything at all. In no time, what I wished for, I became.

She was so busy forgetting, she couldn't take a single step into the future.

I wasn't good company, that was true, and people avoided me, but that was all right. I was too busy dreaming.

I understood wanting to forget. Things that made you remember cut like pieces of glass.

No one called out my name. Finally, I went to open the door. I could smell burning metal.

One day she would surely vanish altogether, and there was no way to stop her. She was so busy forgetting, she couldn't take a single step into the future

I had lost my mother and my father and my sister, and sometimes when I caught a glimpse of myself in a shop window, I wondered if perhaps I hadn't lost myself as well

I was making a different sort of heart, one that was black, one that was protected by thorns, by bats, by raven's wings, by sorrow, by my aloneness, my armour

I thought about how it was impossible to forget, no matter how hard anyone might try.

If sparrows were meant to fly, and hawks to hunt, and greyhounds to run, then a boy such as Diamond was meant to search for his mother. If he didn't go, if he forgot or thought of himself first, then he wouldn't be Diamond.

I started to feel as though I were disappearing. Perhaps I myself was figment of my own imagination, a storm cloud, a wisp of smoke, a burning ember.