Borne Vandermeer Quotes

We all just want to be people, and none of us know what that really means.

That's the problem with people who are not human. You can't tell how badly they're hurt, or how much they need your help, and until you ask, they don't always know how to tell you.

The real reality is something we create every moment of every day, that realities spin off from our decisions in every second we've alive.

Like most men, Wick could not help terror about one thing erupting as anger about something else.

But, in the end, joy cannot fend off evil. Joy can only remind you why you fight.

We were always finding each other and losing each other and finding each other again, and that was just the way of us.

But minds find ways to protect themselves, build fortifications, and some of those walls become traps.

Do you understand? Nothing thrives without being broken. Nothing exists without being dead first.

Am I a person or a weapon?" Always he wanted to know that he was a person. He just kept giving me different choices so one time I might slip up and say, "You're not a person." "You are a person. But like a person, you can be a weapon, too.

And a soul is just a delusion that lives in the body. No delusion survives death. Death is more honest than that.

I doubt you will enjoy it. But that is the price of change. Someone always pays.

but this was always the test of our relationship. Were we symbiotic or parasitic?

Borne made me happy, but happiness never made anyone less stupid

Perhaps only I could truly make Wick a person, by forgiving him, and if I forgave him, if I showed I forgave him, then maybe we could be people together.

What is too much to bear? Not being alive is too much to bear.

That if they could not have a fierce joy in their struggle, then they were not truly free but governed by fear and doubt.

It was what my mother said sometimes-to be mindful that the universe beyond still existed, that we did not know what lived there, and it might be terrible to reconcile ourselves to knowing so little of it, but that didn't mean it stopped existing. There was something else beyond all of this, that would never know us or our struggles, never care, and that it would go on without us. My mother had found that idea comforting.

I was alive, and from past experience I knew in time I would forget enough to again pretend that we could someday be free.

It's not being hurt that hurts,' Borne said.

You forgive if you can forgive yourself. Or live with what you've done. If you cannot live with what you've done, you cannot live with what others have done either.

A creator who no longer remembered the creation: Wasn’t that one definition of a god?

But by then, whenever this was, the Strange Bird did not want to live, or did not know she could live, and that was the same thing in the end.

What am I? How am I connected? What is my purpose? What is all of this, felt in the flesh? Why is it so beautiful? What is beautiful? Why do I not know? What else don't I know? When will I know it? Will I ever know? Would knowing be too much?

Once, it was different. Once, people had homes and parents and went to schools. Cities existed within countries and those countries had leaders. Travel could be for adventure or recreation, not survival. But by the time I was grown up, the wider context was a sick joke. Incredible, how a slip could become a freefall and a freefall could become a hell where we lived on as ghosts in a haunted world.

There was no moment like any other moment and yet each moment was the same.

That tablecloth created by forced labor looks amazing on that table manufactured with formaldehyde in a sweatshop.

You wouldn’t understand me even if I made sense.

People with packs are people with purpose.

If I went rummaging through your carcass, would I find you?

Because dead things felt only love for the universe.

Be still that human need. To fill the silence with words.

I would never know anyone like Borne ever again, and even if I saw Borne again it would never be the same as when we lived together in the Balcony Cliffs, the way we’d run down the corridors and punched holes in the walls and joked and laughed and I’d taught him new words that he’d held there in his mind like jewels, and repeated over and over until he knew them better than I did.

Early on, I had thought Wick was reaching for a body across the bed. But, for a long time, he had been reaching for me--for the person called Rachel, who did indeed, in the end, love back the person name Wick.

There comes a moment when you witness events so epic you don’t know how to place them in the cosmos or in relation to the normal workings of a day. Worse, when these events recur, at an ever greater magnitude, in a cascade of what you have never seen before and do not know how to classify. Troubling because each time you acclimate, you move on, and, if this continues, there is a mundane grandeur to the scale that renders certain events beyond rebuke or judgment, horror or wonder, or even the grasp of history.

In the end, if you change the enemy enough, if you wear them down, perhaps losing is good enough.

The stories he told became boring to me through repetition, but I understand now that he was just trying to fix that place with the compass of his memories.

The real reality is something we create every moment of every day, that realities spin off from our decisions in every second we’re alive.

Also, Moss liked to rescue whatever animal or plant needed it. She believed they had earned it.

She liked the feeling of being winnowed down, as if there had been too much of her before, that anything unnecessary had been taken away and what was left was pure.

For what could happen to her but that she should die, and she had already died so many times.

As the storm washed over them and they huddled there not knowing their futures until it had passed and all was still. None of them ready. Thought they were in the middle. Not the end.

Everything added to her and everything taken away had led to that moment and from her perch she had radiated love for every animal she could not help, with nothing left over for any human being.

The banal drawling frowning speech of men who don’t care about what they’re doing. Until forced to. Who all unawares destroy their own warrens, who poison their own food, convinced of righteousness.

Dead astronauts were no different than living astronauts. Neither could shed their skin. Neither could ever become part of what they journeyed through. Suits were premade coffins. Space was the grave. Better to think of yourself as dead already. There was freedom in that; liberated the mind to roam quadrants farther than the body.

Wick never believed he was a person, was continually being undone by that. Borne was always trying to be a person because I wanted him to be one, because he thought that was right. We all just want to be people, and none of us know what that really means

The way back was harder, and no getting around that-no truth I learned struggling back, except that life is struggle. It placed me in some gray realm beyond, a landscape of exertion and anguish. I had nothing left to give, and yet still I had something left it give.

But all of those points of light above are also suns, even farther away, and they all have worlds, too." "All of them? Every single one? But that's like hundreds." "Thousands. Maybe millions." "But that's incredible," Borne said, quietly. "That's amazing. That's devastating.

How did I know it had happened? Because of its absence now, because I still felt the loss of it, but I didn’t know how to convey that to Borne then, because he had never lost anything. Not back then. He just kept accumulating, sampling, tasting. He kept gaining parts of the world, while I kept losing them.

And the beautiful bird broke into song, and although it was not a song any bird would recognize, the Strange Bird could understand it and whatever remained of Sanji inside of her recognized it and responded, and the two birds sang one to the other, the dead communicating to the dead in that intimate language.

I dearly wished the joy of triangulation, the pounce based on a good ear’s geometry.

But why should they have a leader? Why should they not roam like wild things? For they were wild things. Why should they have a purpose? For they were wild things.

That’s the problem with people who are not human. You can’t tell how badly they’re hurt, or how much they need your help, and until you ask, they don’t always know how to tell you.

I mourned the child I had known who was kind and sweet and curious, and yet could not stop killing.

But what was endurance and shared diminishment if not devotion?

That love must be unbending. Love must be cruel. Love must not yield. Otherwise, love meant nothing, could do nothing.

What was a person but someone who turned monstrous, anyway? What was a person, in Moss's experience, but a kind of demon.

The body did not exist separate from the soul because the soul didn’t exist.

This plastic disk.” “And you throw it.” “Why?” “For fun.” “Team sport.

I do not know when I am being what they want me to be and when I am myself.

She sang for joy. Not because she had not suffered or been reduced. But because she was finally free and the world could not be saved, but nor would it be destroyed.

The world is broken and I don't know how to fix it.

I need to learn. I need to know. [...] It's not being hurt that hurts.

They killed us with traps. They killed us with poisons. They killed us with snares. They killed us with guns. They killed us with knives. They strangled us. They trampled us. They tore us apart with hounds. They baited steel-jawed traps. They starved us out. They burned us alive. They withheld water. They killed all our prey. They slit our throats. They filled in our burrows. They drowned us. They trampled us under horses’ hooves. They bred us for fur and bludgeoned us to death. They kept us in cages so small with so many we burst apart. They suffocated us with poison gas. They strangled us. They put us in sacks and beat us with clubs. They cut out our tongues so we bled to death. They skinned us alive. They detonated rock and stopped our hearts all unknowing. They swung us by our tails and smashed our skulls against stones. They murdered us in each and every year. They murdered us on each and every day.

In the city, the line between nightmare and reality was fluid, just as the context of the words killer and death had shifted over time. Perhaps Mord was responsible. Perhaps we all were.

The things we say to each other, thinking they are so important to say, and yet later regret, that become a part of you no matter how hard you push them away, even as you can’t stop thinking about them.

A glittering reef of stars, spread out phosphorescent, and each one might have life on it, planets revolving around them. There might even be people like us, looking up at the night sky. It was what my mother said sometimes-to be mindful that the universe beyond still existed, that we did not know what lived there, and it might be terrible to reconcile ourselves to knowing so little of it, but that didn't mean it stopped existing. There was something else beyond all of this, that would never know us or our struggles, never care, and that it would go on without us. My mother had found that idea comforting.

But there would come a terrible and obliterating day when beauty was the only thing that mattered, and it mattered little if the pure part of beauty was blood. And on that day, the globes embedded in the walls hurt to look upon because the price paid for the wonders displayed within was too high. It had become a death cult, under a veneer of what was inevitable and necessary, and anything else was illogical.

In truth, some demons were once people who did bad things even though they knew better. In truth, people were demons when they didn't know any better. The girl had learned that it hardly mattered in the end,

Perhaps because trees did not resist. Trees fell over on their own accord, sometimes, as if to prove their love for the ax. The chainsaw that felled most of them just completed a trees own inevitable thought.

Do you have the new phone yet that someone made continents away because they were forced to and then someone else starved to death because when they mined the components they destroyed all the crop lands and the forest?

So she sang back silently to them, as a comfort, there in the cell, and when the moonlight lay thick and bright against the gritty cheek of the sand dune, the foxes would gambol and prance for the sheer delight of it and beckon her to join them, would let her into their minds that she might know what it was to gambol and to prance on those four legs, then these four legs, to see the world from a fox’s level. It was almost like flying. Almost.

Or maybe I was trying to break out of my skin, thinking about how my parents had been actors in roles and the roles were to be my father and mother-and the reason I could see those as roles was that in such extremes, in private, they must have let down their guard and expressed their doubts, their fears, the extent of their despair or hopelessness as our situation worsened and the world revealed the outlines of its true harshness. But because of me, there were whole eternities of hours each day when they had to pretend otherwise, and how I wish I could go back and tell them not to do that. That all I wanted was to see their true selves, remember their true selves.

Throughout all of this, my parents did not forget my education. Not a formal education but the education that mattered. What to value. What to hold on to. What to let go of. What to fight for and what to discard. Where the traps were.

Most had bellies full of plastic. The plastic would grow and grow in their bellies until, years from now, as they mingled, as they drank expensive wine, their bellies would burst and out would come all the plastic, dribbling onto the floor. Pressing cool and bloody against some synthetic floor.

Did you ever need to live on as I needed you to live on? Did you ever had a need so great that the vestiges of your mission existed even if you weren't sure you did? Did you ever believe you were a ghost? Did you ever reach a point when you weren't sure purpose existed anymore? And yet, still. you were here.

In the lab, so many of the scientists had said “forgive me” or “I am so sorry” before doing something irrevocable to the animals in their cages. Because they felt they had the right. Because the situation was extreme and the world was dying. So they had gone on doing the same things that had destroyed the world, to save it. Even a Strange Bird [...] could understand the problem with that logic.

My mother was an overwrought artist who achieved some success but was a little too fond of alcohol and always struggled to find new clients, while my dad the underemployed accountant specialized in schemes to get rich quick that usually brought in nothing. Neither of them seemed to possess the ability to focus on one thing for any length of time. Sometimes it felt as if I had been placed with a family rather than born into one.

A falcon screamed down from above and speared one of the two, and peeled off to rise again before the survivor had time to evade or mourn the loss, as if there had always been one and not two. As if there had always only ever been one Strange Bird. But from above, even dying, the companion defiant, urging the last on, and blessing the bird that had caught her, for it was only acting as to its nature and there was no cruelty in that.

But that's incredible," Borne said, quietly. "That's amazing. That's devastating.

All of these people he had let into his life, and who had turned against him. Or had changed. Or had simply been acting to their nature, and Wick had come into focus for them for a time and then drifted out of focus again.

My voice had a rasp to it, then. I wasn't yet comfortable talking human. My voice had a rasp, and I gazed upon the bison head on the wall and my voice became raspier still. I gazed upon the mossy rock imported from another country, the water feature in the house, and wanted only to return to all fours and drink from the pond. To gaze at the reflection and remember who I was, not who I had become

What was a person but someone who turned monstrous, anyway?

Wick spoke in such alchemies and distillations of hope that I couldn’t pick out the facts from the fictions, or which he told me to reassure himself.

I became a wrestler because I loved a certain kind of aggression born, in part, of joy.

Life is still hard, but it is fair, and there is more joy in it that doesn’t feast on heartache.

You prefer discarded things, the way they bring something or someone with them. Almost as if they bring friends. Company.

You have to open your heart to as much as you can. As much as you can stand. No matter the cost.

We have had all the adventures one lifetime could endure, and it is fine that no one knows but us.

I went back over our conversations in my memory, to see if I could translate them into some other meaning. But it was too late. They are what they are. They mean what they meant, and I know I misremember some of them anyway - and that pains me.

He kills the stars.

What would you have done, reader, who has been able to follow me like the Magician followed me, invisible and ever-watchful and without consequences?

What would you have done, reader, who has been able to follow me like the Magician followed me, invisible and ever-watchful and without consequence? *

Even calling Borne a “he” began to feel faintly ridiculous as he didn’t exhibit the aggression or self-absorption I expected from most males.

then in that moment that I’d begun to love him. Because he didn’t see the world like I saw the world. He didn’t see the traps. Because he made me rethink even simple words like disgusting or beautiful.

Теперь Борн узнал, что его можно ранить. Что он уязвим. Кончилась беззаботная детская радость. Кончились дурачества. Потому что теперь в нем затаится определенное знание: он может умереть.

«Мир сломан, я не знаю, как его починить»

Бывают моменты, когда события, свидетелем которых ты являешься, настолько огромны, что ты просто не можешь найти им место в своей повседневной жизни. Хуже, когда эти события повторяются снова и снова, становясь все огромнее, своего рода водопад, подобного которому ты никогда не встречал и не знаешь, к чему его отнести. Что особенно во всем этом неприятно, это то, что постепенно ты привыкаешь, перестаешь обращать внимание. И когда эти явления продолжают повторяться, само их величие приобретает для тебя черты повседневности, сам их масштаб делает невозможными любые попытки ими восхищаться, ужасаться или судить. И понять их значение.

...обманчивая власть раскаяния, заставляющая нас считать, что силой своего убеждения, силой чувств мы можем все исправить, хотя на самом деле мы ничего не можем.

Our minds were down below, being feasted on by the bears.

The beetles Wick altered, or made from materials he’d stolen from the Company, didn’t just teach when shoved in your ear; they could also rid you of memories and add memories. People who couldn’t face the present shoved them into their ears so they could experience someone else’s happier memories from long ago, from places that didn’t exist anymore.

But, in the end, joy cannot fend off evil. Joy can only remind you why you fight.

What a nothing you made out of the world you were given.

Anonymity amongst the wreckage of the earth. This is what I sought. And a good pair of boots for when it got cold.

That's the problem with people who are not human

I never had a country, never had the choice; I was born into one.

Or as he said sometimes, the system abhors source, makes its mapping into a maze, a mockery, and the more you think you understand it, the more you are colonized by it. And lost.

I was a ghost. I was a ghost.

Borne wasn't even a killer as I was a killer, but someone who killed the innocent and tried to call them guilty.

Rachel, Rachel—what am I?” The strobe of colors felt like a smile or a flash of relief. “That’s a tough one, Borne. I don’t know what you are.” “Am I a squirrel?” “I don’t think so.” “Am I a fish?” “Definitely not!” “Am I a … fox?! Secretly raised as a common animal. But really a royal fox. Most royal of foxes. First among fox-kind.” I

Rachel, Rachel—what am I?” The strobe of colors felt like a smile or a flash of relief. “That’s a tough one, Borne. I don’t know what you are.” “Am I a squirrel?” “I don’t think so.” “Am I a fish?” “Definitely not!” “Am I a … fox?! Secretly raised as a common animal. But really a royal fox. Most royal of foxes. First among fox-kind.” I shook my head. “No, not a fox.

Since Borne never displayed any kind of threatening behavior, I never thought to take him as a threat. Even calling Borne a “he” began to feel faintly ridiculous as he didn’t exhibit the aggression or self-absorption I expected from most males. Instead,

Am I a person in my right mind?” “I don’t know what you mean,” I said, my standard ploy when I wanted time to think. With my right mind. “If there’s a right mind, then there’s a wrong mind.” “I suppose so. Yes.” “How do you get a wrong mind? Is it borned into you?

There had never been a time when all the people everywhere lived in peace. No one had ever had a lasting peace without ignoring atrocity or history, which meant it wasn’t lasting at all. Which meant we were an irrational species.

I see it, I taste it. All the contamination. The low-level radiation, the storage sites, the runoff. Every place is sick—there’s sick everywhere

Can you not distinguish truth from fiction? Or were you never taught the difference?

A creator who no longer remembered the creation: Wasn't that the definition of a god?

...for all of that, I could still imagine a time when the small things we used to love might be returned to us.

But the truth is, I don't really know what he thought or how he thought it, because most of the time I just had his questions.

Maybe, too, I realized right then in that moment that I'd begun to love him. Because he didn't see the world like I saw the world. He didn't see the traps. Because he made me rethink even simple words like disgusting or beautiful.

Such simple things took on such significance.

He looked at me direct from that point on, as if we were only a few steps from the end of the world, and he wanted to fix me in memory.

You need to figure out what you want to be after. Other than a scavenger." "After what?" I asked. But he never told me.

You are a person," I said, because I had to say it. Even with the evidence before me, or perhaps because of it.

Rachel, what happens when we die? Where do we go?" "Nowhere, Borne. We go into the ground and we don't come back out." "I don't think that's true, Rachel. I think we go somewhere. Not to heaven or hell, but we go somewhere. I know we must go somewhere.

Funny what you remember and what you don't.

She couldn't see that she was surrounded by a congregation, that she was surrounded by people, of a kind. I had almost missed it myself, had misunderstood for too long.

We had all been too small in our thoughts, too small to realize what might be revealed to us if we really looked, if we really saw.

I was lost and would remain lost and all I could expect was to survive. So I had made decisions like someone who wasn't a person, who just wanted to survive.

Now I knew why Wick kept trying, forgave so much. Because he felt he had so much to be forgiven for.

A word in my head, I swear, a word, just my name: "Rachel." Which meant something different than it had meant a moment before.

The strange, forgotten animals abandoned by the Company live among us, along with their insatiable curiosity, like Bornes that want nothing from the old world. They need nothing from it. They are their own captains and lead their own lives, although there are still human beings who see them as food, as expandable. In their fearlessness, I find a kind of solace. In how they pursue their own plans, their own destiny, I find relief. They will outstrip all of us in time, and the story of the city will soon be their story, not ours.

We stand by each other and make do with what we have.

I teach him to be both the things I am and the things I can never be.

Neither of us had control over our monsters anymore.

Be at peace," I told them. "Be at peace now and let no one recruit you for their stupid games.

I lay there, panting, as the skin of Borne around me, the flesh of Borne, went prickly and rigid again and the cilia that rubbed up against me turned into tiny mouths that screamed into my clothes, arms and legs and hair. Borne was screaming silently into his own body because he could not scream on the outside.

He would study any number of topics and had no real preferences, his many eyes enthusiastically moving back and forth as he read the pages at a steady clip. I don't believe he needed light, or eyes, to read, but I know he liked to mimic what he saw me doing. Perhaps he even thought it was polite to seem to need light, to seem to need eyes.

There were five of them, and four had traded their eyes for green-gold wasps that curled into their sockets and compounded their vision. Claws graced their hands like sharp commas. Scales at their throats burned red when they breathed. One wing sighed bellows-like out of the naked back of the shortest, the one who still had slate-gray human eyes. After a while, I'd wished he had wasps instead.

Nor could I stop thinking of the perfect little biotech slaves that had paraded themselves around my special cake in the fancy restaurant. In my mind, they kept spiraling that cake for years, as it decayed into black mold and then nothing, and they had to keep trudging around that cake, around and around, singing, until they died in mid-step and their flesh rotted and then faded away, revealing their sad, delicate skeletons.

Apparently we'd been richer than we thought, to suffer such continual diminishment and still be alive.

I tell him the Company is the past preying on the future—that we are the future.

The sun revealing the vast catafalques of sprawled dead Cities against dry brown rockscapes.

Alcohol made it hard to tell a demon from a monster.

If the man could only see his way to the center of a single memory and hold it in his mind, he might understand what has happened to him. Instead, from the edge of his attention, the absence of mother, father, wife, daughter, leaves only outlines. It is too much to bear. It must be borne... In some cases, recognition may take the form of violent acts—one last convulsion against the inevitable. But not in the man's case. In him, the sorrow only deepens, for he has begun to suspect the truth. The man wanders through gardens and courtyard, through tree-lined neighborhoods and along city-tamed streams, all touched equally by the blank expanse of night. He is without thought except to avoid thought, without purpose except to avoid purpose.

You never talk about your past with anyone. Talking just releases memories into the air, and they aren't really yours anymore, or they become changed or other people capture them and hold them prisoner. You want to keep them. The bad ones might infect someone.

In the end, I loved the world, so I remained in the world.

Names of people, of places, meant so little, and so we had stopped burdening others by seeking them. [...] Yet still, I named him Borne.

But beneath that weight lay us, [...] the lines that connected a woman named Rachel to a man named Wick. There was a secret shape to it all that lived inside us, a map that slowly circled within our minds like a personal cosmology.

He had helped to create a weapon so deadly that not even its extreme beauty could justify its use.

But when I came to, I was in the city, walking. I was walking by the river as if I had always been there. Alone.

I wanted to hold on to him as if he were the last sane thing in the world, even if it meant the end of me.

I don't always understand, Rachel. I love you, but I don't understand.

The space at the bottom of the door was open.

So I took him and kept taking him until he had nothing left and we glistened with each other's sweat. Our bodies still knew each other, [...] and here we were at the absolute center of our creation.

You need to get off me." But I clung to him a little longer.

But they're coming. They're coming soon and you want to be ready.

Parts of me I cannot feel. Parts of me are gone.

He knew now that he could be harmed. He knew now that he was vulnerable. No joy would be the same for Borne. No playfulness, either. Because behind it would be this certain knowledge: that he could die.

Now I want to expedition the ceiling.

The words grew large in the night air, kept expanding, until I felt they were important beyond measure. "How did the world get this way?" "I don't know. Because of people, Borne. We did this to ourselves." We were still doing it to ourselves.

The world is so big, Rachel," Borne had said to me. "It just keeps going and going." "It ends eventually." I almost said, "It gets smaller," but bit my tongue.

He carried too much weight, a weight he was always mindful of, that must be present in his life at all times.

We held each other for a time in that hideaway, that unexpected sanctuary, while the city smoldered and the world went on changing without us.

There were no constellations bright enough to blind me to him.

You're scared of me right now," Borne said. "But all I did is what you both do.

There is a cost. A cost for what I am. For what I do.

It is all alive. In me.

I love you, too, Borne," I said, and it was true. "But that doesn't change things." Maybe the memory of love was enough, maybe the time we'd had together would be enough. Yet, inside, I was panicking already, screaming at the thought of it.

I'd been teaching him the whole time, with every last little thing I did, even when I didn't realize I was teaching him. With every last little thing I did, not just those things I tried to teach him. Every moment I had been teaching him, and how I wanted now to take back some of those moments.

I had shut him out, ignored him, tried to pretend he was something other than what he was, and in doing so I had betrayed him. Because Borne knew what he was.

I hadn't known I was so fragile, so delicate in motion. I didn't know Borne had loved me quite so much.

Was this a relief? It should have been, but somehow it seemed foreboding, a sign along with all the other signs that the things we depended on were changing.

And that's what I was then. I was a ghost.

I told myself whatever lie would work. Because I needed a lie.

People still cared, and there was a kind of dangerous ecstasy in that - a kind of displaced passion and recklessness from seeing the way people could still care about something dying, dead.

I wanted to be worthy of it, the way Wick shone so bright, for me.

There was such relief in the ordinary.

I meant it. But only if it was both of us. If it was just me, I would melt into the city. I would disappear and give up my name and my past and any hope of a home, and become no one.

He was born, but I had borne him.

So much of the rest is aftermath.

Moss the shape of Grayson, all around Grayson, covering Grayson like a second skin. Showing, kiss by kiss, the beauty of Grayson to Grayson, who had never thought herself beautiful. That she was beautiful. All of Moss kissing all of her and Grayson seeing herself through Moss’s eyes. Reborn in that moment.

As the ghost immersed herself in the night, became steeped in it and more comfortable, the ghost’s search became more and more meaningless. The ghost’s purpose changed and the ghost became a chronicler in her head of a damaged city, a city that could not go on like this forever, torn between foes and monsters, before it, too, became a ghost. The body still gasped and drew breath and reanimated itself—contained the capacity to be rejuvenated, even now. But not forever. Eventually the collective memory would fail, and travelers, if travelers ever came again, would find a stretch of desert that had once been a vast ocean and hardly a sign that a city had ever been here. Yet, despite this, people still cared. As the ghost wandered, she could see that people still cared, and there was a kind of dangerous ecstasy in that—a kind of displaced passion and recklessness from seeing the way people could still care about something dying, dead.

The way back was no easier than the way there. The way back was harder, and no getting around that—no truth I learned struggling back, except that life is struggle. It placed me in some gray realm beyond, a landscape of exertion and anguish. I had nothing left to give, and yet still I had something left to give.

(Up until this very day.) They swung us by our tails and smashed our skulls against stones. They murdered us in each and every year. They murdered us on each and every day. They killed us with traps. They killed us with poisons. They killed us with snares. They killed us with guns. They killed us with knives. They strangled us. They trampled us. They tore us apart with hounds. They baited steel-jawed traps. They starved us out. They burned us alive. They withheld water. They killed all our prey. They slit our throats. They filled in our burrows. They drowned us. They trampled us under horses’ hooves. They bred us for fur and bludgeoned us to death. They kept us in cages so small with so many we burst apart. They suffocated us with poison gas. They strangled us. They put us in sacks and beat us with clubs. They cut out our tongues so we bled to death. They skinned us alive. They detonated rock and stopped our hearts all unknowing. (They keep coming; they never stop.) They swung us by our tails and smashed our skulls against stones.

And I will always be there." Even before I know you. Even after I've known you. Even then.