The Strange and Beautiful Sorrows of Ava Lavender

Just because love don't look the way you think it should, don't mean you don't have it.

I found it ironic that I should be blessed with wings and yet feel so constrained, so trapped. It was because of my condition, I believe, that I noticed life's ironies a bit more often than the average person. I collected them: how love arrived when you least expected it, how someone who said he didn't want to hurt you eventually would.

And that might just be the root of the problem: we're all afraid of each other, wings or no wings.

Love, as most know, follows its own timeline. Disregarding our intentions or well rehearsed plans.

To many, I was myth incarnate, the embodiment of a most superb legend, a fairy tale. Some considered me a monster, a mutation. To my great misfortune, I was once mistaken for an angel. To my mother, I was everything. To my father, nothing at all. To my grandmother, I was a daily reminder of loves long lost. But I knew the truth—deep down, I always did. I was just a girl.

By this point Viviane Lavender had loved Jack Griffith for twelve years, which was far more than half of her life. If she thought of her love as a commodity and were to, say, eat it, it would fill 4,745 cherry pies. If she were to preserve it, she would need 23,725 glass jars and labels and a basement spanning the length of Pinnacle Lane. If she were to drink it, she'd drown.

Why would you be given wings if you weren't meant to fly?

She laughed for her wasted, difficult life that never had to be wasted or difficult in the first place.

Fate. As a child, that word was often my only companion. It whispered to me from dark corners during lonely nights. It was the song of the birds in spring and the call of the wind through bare branches on a cold winter afternoon. Fate. Both my anguish and my solace. My escort and my cage.

I loved you before, Ava. Let me love you still.

She spent her days trying to forget the sound of his voice, and her nights trying to remember.

The first of many autumn rains smelled smoky, like a doused campsite fire, as if the ground itself had been aflame during those hot summer months. It smelled like burnt piles of collected leaves, the cough of a newly revived chimney, roasted chestnuts, the scent of a man's hands after hours spent in a wood shop.

To my mother, I was everything. To my father, nothing at all. To my grandmother, I was a daily reminder of loves long lost.

That fact filled Gabe with so much hope that he grew another two inches just to have enough room to hold it all.

Dangers lurk around every corner for the strange.

Those born under Pacific Northwest skies are like daffodils: they can achieve beauty only after a long, cold sulk in the rain.

She found that she did not mind losing the previous moment, for this one was just as lovely.

And that might just be the root of the problem: we’re all afraid of each other.

She is the glorious reincarnation of every woman ever loved.

It was the song of the birds in spring and the call of the wind through bare branches on a cold winter afternoon. Fate. Both my anguish and my solace. My escort and my cage.

Falling out of love was much harder than Gabe would have liked. Normally led through life by the heart attached to his sleeve, finding logic in love proved to be a bit like getting vaccinated for some dread disease: a good idea in the end, but the initial pain certainly wasn’t any fun. He came to appreciate that there were worse ways to live than to live without love. For instance, if he didn’t have arms, Gabe wouldn’t be able to hide in his work. Yes, a life without arms would be quite tragic, indeed.

She didn't see it because when it came to love, she saw what she wanted to see.

I have traveled through continents, languages, and time trying to understand all that I am and all that has made me such.

She struggled to distinguish between signs she received from the universe and those she conjured up in her head.

The Griffith House was like nothing Viviane remembered, reminding her of how fast the world changed and of how insignificant she was in the grand scheme of things. She thought it unfair that her life should be both irrelevant and difficult. One or the other seemed quite enough.

To think Viviane was beautiful required a certain acquired taste. It was the kind of beauty perceived only through the eyes of love.

I met someone.' And the leaves fell from the trees, landing to float in the calm black waters.

For a very long time, Viviane and Jack lived in that world people inhabit before love. Some people called that place friendship; others called it confusing. Viviane found it a pleasant place with an altitude that only occasionally made her nauseous.