“What do we do now?” I asked her.
I was surprised, at first, by her sadness. I had thought she felt only delight—but sadness, of course, was a feeling all of us have always known. Was a feeling I had known, even before everything else.
Sayfa 154 - i had known even before everything else.
I was the faded one, and she was still vibrant and young, full of abandon and light.
But also: I was the one with a heartbeat, with a body that made me stop and rest, with time that would someday run out. Of the two of us, I was the one with a responsibility to the world, so I needed to wake myself up.
I knew that. And I knew that the rage rising within me was out of my control. It would choke out all the remaining light. I was rotten, I was wretched, I was bad. How stupid to think I could ever be good.
I saw the good and the breathtaking and the bad and the rotten. I saw all of it. But a voice, even then, was whispering that it was one. No parsing to be done. Revelation and obscurity, terror and power, beauty and revulsion, joy and shame—all of it together in its tangle. Horrible and lovely. Mine always to keep.
I could wake him. Morning would come.
He would rise and devour us again.
Lies and tricks. The way he took her from me and kept taking and taking. My ghost—he took her, too. And he hurt us on purpose. And he poisoned everything good—the California poppies, the hours my mother spent with me, even the story of us.