The Ones We're Meant to Find

None of us live without consequence. Our personal preferences are not truly personal. One person’s needs will deny another’s. Our privileges can harm ourselves and others.

Because it was possible to love someone without fully understanding them. Possible to love parts of them, and not their whole.

The problem with oceans? They always seem smaller from the shore.

People wanted the quickest, easiest solutions. To solve their most immediate problems, they could steal from any future other than their own.

And I think we have even less choice over the ones we’re meant to find.

No one enters this world by choice. If we're lucky, we can choose how we leave.

Alone is an island. It’s an uncrossable sea, being too far from another soul, whereas lonely is being too close, in the same house yet separated by walls because we choose to be, and when I fall asleep, the pain of loneliness follows me as I dream of more walls.

Everyone lived at the expense of someone else.

Celia had loved the sea. Loved the whitecaps that foamed like milk, the waltz of sunlight atop the peaks. Kasey did not. The sea was a trillion strands of hair, infinitely tangled on the surface and infinitely dense beneath. It distorted time: Minutes passed like hours and hours passed like minutes out there. It distorted space, made the horizon seem within reach. And it was the perfect place for hiding secrets.

Would people ever willingly give up their freedom for the good of others?

I love you. And even if you failed me, I'd never replace you

The ocean does not come poisoned. People poison it.

The dominos had been set centuries ago. One quake, and they all fell.

Others might believe there’s power in a single step,” murmured Actinium, the cadence of his breath brushing Kasey’s ear. Her eyes widened. His warmth was real. So was the brace of his arm. The press of his chest. “But most choices are made before you reach the edge.

The only place Kasey still found Celia was in her dreams.

When I dream of her, it’s in vibrant color, unlike the gradients of gray of my monochrome days. But everything is hazy when I wake. The details merge. The colors fade.

Even in a sea, every life rippled far beyond its end.

We would have drained [the sea] long ago if we could, just to find the secrets at the bottom. And then it'd be like everything else. Discovered.

We are as real as we believe ourselves to be.

Most choices are made before you reach the edge.

Home could be here, for all I care, if she were with me.

Not all molecules were meant to bond.

Would people ever willingly give up their freedoms for the good of others?

But the difference between asylum and prison was membrane-thin.

WAIT FOR ME, KAY. I’M coming for you.

I am vast as an ocean, the only sea I don't have to cross, and for the first time in a long time, I remember what it feels like to drown in myself.

Some names are found. Others are earned." -Cee