61
" Shrieking Brooke’s name as loudly as I could, out in the corridor, I brought her running quickly to my room.
‘What’s happened, what’s wrong?’ she immediately cried concerned, legging it up the stairs two at a time. She appeared breathless outside the kitchen door. Brian appeared sleepily at his door too, awoken by the noise, and watched us.
‘She’s moving,’ I cried.
‘What? Flutters like before?’
‘No more, here feel.’ I grabbed her hand and pushed it down onto my
exposed belly. Brian averted his eyes as I stood, belly out and top up over my bra, in the middle of the corridor.
‘I can’t push you that hard,’ she exclaimed, pulling back her fingers surprised. ‘It will hurt you, or her, I can’t do that.’
‘Yes, you can,’ I insisted. ‘You won’t hurt us.’ I pulled her hand back and pushed her long fingers into my belly and we stood waiting, hardly daring to breathe. You kicked again, hard into my side, under Brooke’s long pink fingernails. Brooke jumped away from me in shock and then burst out laughing. She clapped her hands together delighted.
‘Well?’ I asked her.
‘She kicked me,’ Brooke shrieked still jumping up and down clapping. ‘She kicked me. That was amazing, let me do it again.’ She came back over towards me slowly. Cautiously she pushed her fingers into the same spot on my side. We waited again in silence and I saw her face slightly drop as the seconds ticked by.
‘Ah it works,’ she yelled, as again she jumped back shocked as the tiny little feet thudded from my insides at her hand. ‘I love it. Do it again.’ I laughed and then Brian stepped forward.
‘Can I have a go?’ he asked quietly, fiddling with his hands and stepping out of his room towards us.
‘Of course you can, come here.’
And that is how we spent the next few minutes out in the corridor by the kitchen, shrieking, whooping, and jumping around. If anyone had been in the house, I know they would probably have thought we were all mad. Mad, no. Thrilled and excited, most definitely.
Baby girl, you did that to us. Thank you. "
― Emily Williams , Letters to Eloise
62
" And I do. I do wonder, I think about it all the time. What it would be like to kill myself. Because I never really know, I still can't tell the difference, I'm never quite certain whether or not I'm actually alive. I sit here every single day. Run, I said to myself. Run until your lungs collapse, until the wind whips and snaps at your tattered clothes, until you're a blur that blends into the background.
Run, Juliette, run faster, run until your bones break and your shins split and your muscles atrophy and your heart dies because it was always too big for your chest and it beat too fast for too long and you run.
Run run run until you can't hear their feet behind you. Run until they drop their fists and their shouts dissolve in the air. Run with your eyes open and your mouth shut and dam the river rushing up behind your eyes. Run, Juliette.
Run until you drop dead. Make sure your heart stops before they ever reach you. Before they ever touch you.
Run, I said. "
― , Unravel Me (Shatter Me, #2)
64
" What do you see when you look at me?”
My eyes narrowed and I pressed my lips together, weighing my thoughts. All of his bimbo admirers aside, what did I see? What did my gut tell me about this man? What did it say that allowed me to wind up here with him, under such impulsive circumstances?
“You’re a sad man,” I swallowed. “You’re arrogant and set in your ways, but that creates a fortress for you. It’s your safe haven. Behind the moat is someone who has lost something he loved, only I’m not sure what, or who. You’re afraid of something and your loyalty is hidden away in a cell, wounded by betrayal.” I rested my head on the pillow. “That’s what I see.”
“On second thought,” he exhaled, letting his head drop next to mine. “You’re psychic. "
― , Preservation (Preservation, #1)
65
" ...a small part of me that worried that Tori wouldn’t be here when I arrived, that I pushed her too far, too fast, that somehow I read her wrong and asked her for more than she was willing to give.
But she’s here. She’s magnificent. And she’s mine.
That thought steals the air from my lungs. Her shoulders tense at my gasp, when she realizes she’s no longer alone.
“Hello, beautiful,” my voice husky. I drop my bags by the door and swiftly cross the room.
I only have a split second to take in how devastating she looks in her blue gown. I don’t know who moves first, but she’s in my arms as my lips descend on hers. With that first contact, the knot of tension that’s taken up residence between my shoulder blades releases, and I finally feel like I can breathe fully for the first time since I left for Los Angeles. "
― D.L. Hess , Sir: The Awakening (The Awakening Series Book 2)
70
" A Second Childhood.”
When all my days are ending
And I have no song to sing,
I think that I shall not be too old
To stare at everything;
As I stared once at a nursery door
Or a tall tree and a swing.
Wherein God’s ponderous mercy hangs
On all my sins and me,
Because He does not take away
The terror from the tree
And stones still shine along the road
That are and cannot be.
Men grow too old for love, my love,
Men grow too old for wine,
But I shall not grow too old to see
Unearthly daylight shine,
Changing my chamber’s dust to snow
Till I doubt if it be mine.
Behold, the crowning mercies melt,
The first surprises stay;
And in my dross is dropped a gift
For which I dare not pray:
That a man grow used to grief and joy
But not to night and day.
Men grow too old for love, my love,
Men grow too old for lies;
But I shall not grow too old to see
Enormous night arise,
A cloud that is larger than the world
And a monster made of eyes.
Nor am I worthy to unloose
The latchet of my shoe;
Or shake the dust from off my feet
Or the staff that bears me through
On ground that is too good to last,
Too solid to be true.
Men grow too old to woo, my love,
Men grow too old to wed;
But I shall not grow too old to see
Hung crazily overhead
Incredible rafters when I wake
And I find that I am not dead.
A thrill of thunder in my hair:
Though blackening clouds be plain,
Still I am stung and startled
By the first drop of the rain:
Romance and pride and passion pass
And these are what remain.
Strange crawling carpets of the grass,
Wide windows of the sky;
So in this perilous grace of God
With all my sins go I:
And things grow new though I grow old,
Though I grow old and die. "
― G.K. Chesterton , The Collected Poems of G. K. Chesterton
73
" But words are things, and a small drop of ink,
Falling like dew, upon a thought, produces
That which makes thousands, perhaps millions, think;
’T is strange, the shortest letter which man uses
Instead of speech, may form a lasting link
Of ages; to what straits old Time reduces
Frail man, when paper — even a rag like this,
Survives himself, his tomb, and all that’s his. "
― Lord Byron , Don Juan
74
" AlmondineTo her, the scent and the memory of him were one. Where it lay strongest, the distant past came to her as if that morning: Taking a dead sparrow from her jaws, before she knew to hide such things. Guiding her to the floor, bending her knee until the arthritis made it stick, his palm hotsided on her ribs to measure her breaths and know where the pain began. And to comfort her. That had been the week before he went away.He was gone, she knew this, but something of him clung to the baseboards. At times the floor quivered under his footstep. She stood then and nosed into the kitchen and the bathroom and the bedroom-especially the closet-her intention to press her ruff against his hand, run it along his thigh, feel the heat of his body through the fabric.Places, times, weather-all these drew him up inside her. Rain, especially, falling past the double doors of the kennel, where he’d waited through so many storms, each drop throwing a dozen replicas into the air as it struck the waterlogged earth. And where the rising and falling water met, something like an expectation formed, a place where he might appear and pass in long strides, silent and gestureless. For she was not without her own selfish desires: to hold things motionless, to measure herself against them and find herself present, to know that she was alive precisely because he needn’t acknowledge her in casual passing; that utter constancy might prevail if she attended the world so carefully. And if not constancy, then only those changes she desired, not those that sapped her, undefined her.And so she searched. She’d watched his casket lowered into the ground, a box, man-made, no more like him than the trees that swayed under the winter wind. To assign him an identity outside the world was not in her thinking. The fence line where he walked and the bed where he slept-that was where he lived, and they remembered him.Yet he was gone. She knew it most keenly in the diminishment of her own self. In her life, she’d been nourished and sustained by certain things, him being one of them, Trudy another, and Edgar, the third and most important, but it was really the three of them together, intersecting in her, for each of them powered her heart a different way. Each of them bore different responsibilities to her and with her and required different things from her, and her day was the fulfillment of those responsibilities. She could not imagine that portion of her would never return. With her it was not hope, or wistful thoughts-it was her sense of being alive that thinned by the proportion of her spirit devoted to him." ory of Edgar Sawtelle" As spring came on, his scent about the place began to fade. She stopped looking for him. Whole days she slept beside his chair, as the sunlight drifted from eastern-slant to western-slant, moving only to ease the weight of her bones against the floor.And Trudy and Edgar, encapsulated in mourning, somehow forgot to care for one another, let alone her. Or if they knew, their grief and heartache overwhelmed them. Anyway, there was so little they might have done, save to bring out a shirt of his to lie on, perhaps walk with her along the fence line, where fragments of time had snagged and hung. But if they noticed her grief, they hardly knew to do those things. And she without the language to ask. "
80
" oxygen
Everything needs it: bone, muscles, and even,
while it calls the earth its home, the soul.
So the merciful, noisy machine
stands in our house working away in its
lung-like voice. I hear it as I kneel
before the fire, stirring with a
stick of iron, letting the logs
lie more loosely. You, in the upstairs room,
are in your usual position, leaning on your
right shoulder which aches
all day. You are breathing
patiently; it is a
beautiful sound. It is
your life, which is so close
to my own that I would not know
where to drop the knife of
separation. And what does this have to do
with love, except
everything? Now the fire rises
and offers a dozen, singing, deep-red
roses of flame. Then it settles
to quietude, or maybe gratitude, as it feeds
as we all do, as we must, upon the invisible gift:
our purest, sweet necessity: the air. "
― Mary Oliver , Thirst
