Home > Author > Sonali Deraniyagala
41 " I hadn't shed a tear all day, and I wasn't going to. Not with all these people here, not now. "
― Sonali Deraniyagala , Wave
42 " By knowing them again, by gathering threads of our life, I am much less fractured. I am also less confused. I don’t constantly ask, Was I their mother? How can so much of my life not even seem like mine? I can recover myself better when I dare let in their light. "
43 " In a few hours it will be light. It will be tomorrow. I don't want it to be tomorrow. I was terrified that tomorrow, the truth would start. "
44 " I’d never heard shrieking like this before. So wild, wretched, it frightened me, rattled the wall I was holding on to. This noise was crackling into the numbness in my head. It was blasting the smallest stir of hope in my heart. It was telling me that what had happened was unthinkable, but I didn’t want this confirmed. Not by wailing strangers, I did not. "
45 " Such a puny life. Starved of their loveliness, I feel shrunken. Diminished and faded, without their sustenance, their beauty, their smiles. "
46 " I never did find Crazy Cow. I stopped searching the day I found the shirt Vik wore on our last evening, Christmas night. It was a lime-green cotton shirt. I remembered him fussing that he didn't want to wear it, it had long sleeves, which he didn't like. Steve rolled up the sleeves for him. "There, that looks smart." When I found the shirt, it was under a spiky busy, half-buried in sand. I pulled it out, not knowing what this piece of tattered yellowing fabric was. I dusted off the sand. Those parts of the shirt that had not been bleached by salt water and sun were still bright green. One of the sleeves was still rolled up. "
47 " And the three silly boys would fall about laughing. Now I sit in this garden in New York, and I hear them, jubilant, gleeful, on our lawn. "
48 " This is very different from those early months after the wave, when all I heard was a sudden whisper, some snatches of sound. Their voices have doubled in strength now, not faded with time. Their chatter plays with my thoughts no end. And I am sustained by this, it gives me spark. "
49 " I am here because they are gone? That was when their absence, as well as their realness, was wavering and suspect. It’s different now. I know it is true that they are not here. An unfathomable truth, but maybe I am more accustomed to it. "
50 " More and more now I keep my balance while staring into us. And I welcome this, a small triumph, it lights me up. "
51 " Seven years on, and their absence has expanded. Just as our life would have in this time, it has swelled. So this is a new sadness, I think. For I want them as they would be now. I want to be in our life. Seven years on, it is distilled, my loss. For I am not whirling anymore, I am no longer cradled by shock. "
52 " I suspect that I can only stay steady as I traverse this world that’s empty of my family when I admit the reality of them, and me. For I am without them, as much as I am on my own. And when I hold back this truth, I am cut loose, adrift, hazy about my identity. Who am I now? "
53 " All that they were missing, I desperately shut out. I was terrified of everything because everything was from that life. Anything that excited them, I wanted destroyed. "
54 " I can't die. For them, I have to stay alive. "
55 " But I don't want to die, our life is good, I thought. I don't want it to be over, we have much more to do, so much. "
56 " These five years I’ve been so fearful of details. The more I remember, the more inconsolable I will be, I’ve told myself. But now increasingly I don’t tussle with my memories. I want to remember. I want to know. Perhaps I can better tolerate being inconsolable now. Perhaps I suspect that remembering won’t make me any more inconsolable. Or less. "
57 " Yet I silently and hopelessly murmured, there might, might just be the smallest chance. "
58 " I was held for a few moments in the coherence and safety of the life we had, when so much seemed predictable. "
59 " I wanted to escape the madness of the hospital, I wanted to get away from everyone at Mette’s house, but couldn’t I somehow stay suspended in my confusion? I want to sit in the back of this moving van forever. In a few hours it will be light. It will be tomorrow. I don’t want it to be tomorrow. I was terrified that tomorrow the truth would start. "
60 " Let them, let our life, become as unreal as that wave. "