I am looking around at the crowd of people, listening to the sounds of clinking plates and voices chattering. I am inside of an ecosystem that I don’t belong in.
She lets herself feel. The organs that buffer her emotions from physical response shut down, and all she’s hidden washes over her. Her heart quakes. She heaves in gulps of breath, and she is so alone.
She memorized the tiny constellation of freckles to the left of his nose, the many expressions of his face. I knew them almost as well as she did, because watching him love Tiger Lily was better than not watching him at all.
I’ve fallen back into thinking about him at night. The only way I’ve been able to sleep in the end is by distracting myself with Cloud Atlas. Whenever I’ve thought about kissing Henry, I’ve read a page. It’s 544 pages long. I’ve almost finished the book.
I wish sometimes I could be less fierce with you. No—I feel sometimes like I ought to want to be less fierce with you. That this—whatever this is—would be better served by tenderness, by gentle kindness.
See? There I go scab-picking again. You should just hang me in a museum. I’ll pose as a nasty historical fact, wave at cameras, lecture only in the rhetoric of a victim.
It’s not that I never noticed before how many red things there are in the world. It’s that they were never any more relevant to me than green or white or gold. Now it’s as if the whole world sings to me in petals, feathers, pebbles, blood.
Let them start their dreadful wars, let destruction rain down, and let plague sweep through, but I will still be here, doing my work, holding humankind together with love like this.
I can hide in words so long as I scatter them through my body; to read your letters is to gather flowers from within myself, pluck a blossom here, a fern there, arrange and rearrange them in ways to suit a sunny room.
