The Lighthouse Witches

Forgiveness is a kind of time travel, only better, because it sutures the wounds of the past with the wisdom of the present in the same moment as it promises a better future.

We form stories about our lives to create meaning out of them—without meaning, they feel shapeless and without purpose. When something lies beyond the realm of meaning, it’s terrifying.

Life continues outrageously, in whatever form it can. An unstoppable circularity: the past always in the present.

...the ocean, the perpetual shapeshifter: one day a disc of hammered gold, the next wild and rearing, like a thousand white horses. I noticed how the ocean had moods, just like a person.

I used to tell myself that I regretted the choices I'd made in my life. But every choice, including the wrong ones, made me who I was... -both the good and bad experiences strengthened you, shaped you. We are not just made of blood and bone- we are made of stories. Some of us have our stories told for us, other write their own- you wrote yours.

The lighthouse was called The Longing. Pitched amidst tessellations of rock black as coke, thrashed for over a hundred years by disconsolate squalls, it needled upwards, spine-straight, a white bolt locking earth, sky, and ocean together. It was lovely in its decrepitude, feathery paint gnawed off by north winds and rust-blazed window frames signatures of use and purpose. -The Lighthouse Witches, C.J. Cooke

She hadn't kept anything from him that she hadn't been keeping from herself. He doesn't get that truth and memory can be too complex, too tentacled, to boil down to a linear narrative. That sometimes, silence is a form of survival.

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. —Voltaire

She still doesn’t believe in magic. It’s a technology, she’s decided. Just one that she doesn’t understand yet.

Don't tell me you believe in ghosts, Finn.' 'Ghosts, not exactly. Traces, yeah. Sort of.' 'Traces?' 'Here's my theory. Everything is energy. We all leave something behind. Now, there's folk who'll swear on their granny's last breath that they've seen a ghost. And I reckon some of them have. Or rather, they've seen traces of a past energy.' ... Finn was talking with his hands now, trying to make some sense. 'We think that time moves forward, in a linear fashion. Yeah? But sometimes you get deja vu, or there's some mad coincidence that you can't explain. I think time doesn't move in a linear fashion, but in a spiral, and sometimes there's echoes from the past. And a ghost is just an echo of someone.

When I looked out at the beach, I imagined each grain of sand like a measure of time that I'd been allotted. I could either let them run through my hands or I could stop and pay attention.

She hasn't kept anything from him that she hadn't been keeping from herself. He doesn't get that truth and memory can be too complex, too tentacled, to boil down to a linear narrative. That sometimes, silence is a form of survival.

I went outside, taking in the sight of the grey ocean swaying beyond the cliffs, a mackerel sky troubled by seabirds swooping and screaming beneath the clap of the waves.

Most people's pasts can be viewed like cleaved water left in the wake of a boat. Hers? It's a tangled weave of spider webs and nightmares, never to make sense.

... the sky like polished silver, the ocean sinewy and muscular, crackling as it reached the stones at the edge of the causeway.

The best way to tell a false narrative, I think, is to consider how neatly cause and effect have been fastened together.

She had a beautiful Scottish brogue and spoke fast, as though the words were too hot to hold in her mouth for long.

A limpet is a creature without eyes, limbs, without so much as a brain. And yet it creates for itself a spot in the rock that is its home. it leaves its mark on that spot; wearing away the rock and its shell forms a perfect seal. The homes scar. Maybe time is like that. Maybe we always move to exactly where and when we belong, without realising it.