That’s when I realized that certain moments go on forever. Even after they’re over they still go on, even after you’re dead and buried, those moments are lasting still, backward and forward, on into infinity. They are everything and everywhere all at once.
They are the meaning.
“You shouldn’t believe everything you hear,” I blurt out, and all three girls instantly shut their mouths and stare at me.
“It’s true,” I say, feeling bolder now that I have such a captive audience. “You know how most rumors starts?”
The girls shake their heads. They’re standing so close I think for a second their skulls are going to knock together.
“Because somebody feels like it.”
-Lauren Oliver (Before I Fall)
[I] wonder how many people are clutching secrets like little fists, like rocks sitting in the pits of their stomachs. All of them, maybe.
It amazes me how easy it is for things to change, how easy it is to start off down the same road you always take and wind up somewhere new. Just one false step, one pause, one detour, and you end up with new friends or a bad reputation or a boyfriend or a breakup. It’s never occurred to me before; I’ve never been able to see it. And it makes me feel, weirdly, like maybe all of these different possibilities exist at the same time, like each moment we live has a thousand other moments layered underneath it that look different.
A good friend keeps your secrets for you. A best friend helps you keep your own secrets.
This was the other problem with living ones: They were separate, always separate. They could not truly merge. They did not know how to be anyone other than themselves, and even that they did not know how to be sometimes.
Because I do want. I’m not even sure what, exactly, but the want is there, just like the hate and anger were there before. But this is not a tower. It is an endless, tunneling pit; it drives deep, and open a hole inside me.
I wonder if this is how people always get close: They heal each other’s wounds; they repair the broken skin.
Grief is like sinking, like being buried. I am in water the tawny color of kicked-up dirt. Every breath is full of choking. There is nothing to hold on to, no sides, no way to claw myself up. There is nothing to do but let go.
Let go. Feel the weight all around you, feel the squeezing of your lungs, the slow, low pressure. Let yourself go deeper. There is nothing but bottom. There is nothing but the taste of metal, and the echoes of old things, and days that look like darkness.
Useless was one of the alchemist’s favourite words, and he used it interchangeably to describe Will’s plans, thoughts, work, appearance, and general selfhood.
