The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding

I know this: when we lose people we love, they go back to our ancestors, back to the stars. All that love doesn’t just vanish. It’s absorbed by country and sea and sky, by everything, and it lives on. I know this,’ Nin said. ‘But it still hurts, every single day that she’s not here with us.

There's a certain kind of beauty that can only exist because of darkness.

Catch the gold in your eyelashes so we have light for later, Starry, so it won't be dark in our dreams.

The way any story is understood reveals both the nature of the person telling it, and the person who reads it or hears it. Stories are living things because we make them so, right? A story only dies when it's forgotten.

On the afternoon that Esther Wilding drove homeward along the coast, a year after her sister had walked into the sea and disappeared, the light was painfully golden.

(...) the silver birch is revered in eastern European cultures as a curative for sadness: you tell your heartache to the tree, wrap your arms around it, give it all your pain and the tree takes it from you. Then sheds your pain in its bark, like an unneeded skin. Everything is transformed. You, your pain, the tree.

The speed of light,' he explained. 'More specifically, how many metres per second light travels. I had it made after Aura was... gone. After you left for the west coast. I wanted something tangible I could hold on to. To remember. That I wasn't alone. I want you to take it. so that you remember. While you're away. You're never alone.' Jack leaned forward and ran a fingertip over the number sequence. 'The light in the stars that you'll look up and see in Denmark is travelling from the past. Some of that light started its journey when she was_' He looked to the dimming sky. Waited out the emotion. 'I want you to remember that some of the starlight you'll see every night in Denmark started its journey when Aura was still with us.' He finished. Esther clutched the keyring in her palm.

In Ancient Egypt,’ Aura murmurs, ‘Cleopatra believed that by lining her eyes with kohl, just like yours are, the gods would grant her protection against harm.

Also known as sólja, the national plant of the Faroes. She survives harsh winters, to bloom near water again. In other words, through crisis, she transforms.

Sylvia Plath’s neon words glowed on the wall of Tattoo Stjerne. Wear your heart on your skin in this life.

He'd always done that, taken something Esther shared with him, carefully looked it over because it was important to her and handed it back to her a little shinier than before.

His smile is its own sun.

Her unlived life with two sisters, with a niece, was a ghost ship that sailed without her; a voyage she would never know.

You can see it, but it's not really there. Just like the end of a rainbow, the horizon is an illusion.

Henry Thoreau wrote that about what you're doing and what we know by instinct in the Faroes: walking, being in nature, is something that makes us better. Something we all need.

Everything I've wanted most in life has been on the other side of finding the courage to ask for the help I need.

Not one person in the world knew exactly where she was in that moment. She could evaporate on the spot, disappear into thin air, and no one would know.

There's a theory in academic writing circles that, just like starlight, every story has seven points to it. (...) Think of the points like events: seven things that happen to the main character that change her in little ways, that move her through her, well, skins, if we use Aura's term. So that who she becomes by the end of her story when she's shed her seven skins - or seven stories - is a result of what she's gone through in all of them.