The Gloaming

We can't carry our whole lives with us everywhere we go. Memories have weight, and no one can lift them all at once. We have to leave some of them behind.

To stay in the gloaming is to hold off the night. But if the night never comes, then neither can the day.

Why would you think that I would only like you when you’re nice? I like you like this,’ she said, ‘and I like you not like this, and I like you every way you can possibly be.

The thing about these islands is that you can never find them when you want to. If you're lucky - if the wind is blowing right, and you've made the correct sacrifices, and the world is tilting just so - then the island will emerge from the mist, waiting for you. But if you go in search for it, it will sink down beneath the waves, and all you will see is the distant wink of those bright towers.

What Mara didn't see was that this time with Pearl was the gloaming: that space between day and night, that lowering of the sky, when the light pales to blue and everything is outlined in gold. It's the most beautiful part of the day - the golden hour, the photographer's favourite. But it can't last. To stay in the gloaming is to hold off the night. But if the night never comes, then neither can the day.

There is plenty of wonder in the real world too.

What bothered her most was how mundane it all was. This terrible thing had happened - this huge, life-changing thing that meant the world would never be the same. But outside their house, whose life had changed? Even inside the house, what, really, had changed beyond repair? They still had to get up every morning. They still had to eat breakfast. They had to pay bills and buy toilet paper and smile at the postman. They didn't wander through moonlit rooms tearing at their hair. They didn't curse an unfeeling god. The whole world should have shifted on its axis, should have shaken the petals from every flower, uprooted every mountain. And here they were, going through the motions, as if they'd lost a pet cat or a set of keys.

Bee had always been the golden boy, but that summer he gleamed. Buttercup sun lolled through the branches, catching the fuzz on his bare shoulders and back. Their tiny haloed lion.

So what happens if you make it to an island, whether mythical or real? Well. Whatever it is, it's rarely what you expect - and it's never what you want.

Mara wished for a storm, for the clap and slash of the splitting sky. She wished for something to break, to change, to be undone - so that it could all be over; so that she could go up onto the cliff and be still forever. But until then - she reached for her latest book, ready to read and unread another death.

When I was a child, sadness was the islands- rocky, yes, but small and containable, easy to leave. Now sadness was the sea. So I went in... I knew the water was cold, but to me it felt warm. No-that's not right. It felt like nothing.