Spells For Forgetting Adrienne Young Quotes

There are spells for breaking and spells for mending. But there are no spells for forgetting.

There were tales that only the island knew. Ones that had never been told. I knew, because I was one of them.

My heart was that strange, shooting star. Always falling.

We’d had no beginning, I realized. We just always were. When I thought about it like that, it was comforting. Like there was no waiting for an end, either.

This pain inside me was like broken glass clutched in a fist. I knew it was drawing blood. Bleeding me out, all day, every day. But still, I couldn’t just open my fingers and let it go. Because this wasn’t that kind of love.

Sometimes the signs were subtle, like a fleeting shadow or an echo in the trees. Other times, the island wasn’t gentle with her words. This wasn’t like the gentle shift of wind before a storm. Something dead had woken.

I’ve lived enough years now to know that there were some ghosts that haunted you forever. Saoirse had secrets, yes. But so did we.

I loved her long before that. I don't really remember a time that I didn't love her.

So she’d never asked and I’d never told her, and in the end, it broke us anyway.

There were some things that were a part of you, no matter how badly they hurt.

She smelled like sun and the drying herbs that hung in the tea shop. She felt like home.

While the outside world was burning their witches, we were here. On the island.

At times, I'd even felt like that one memory was the only thing that was keeping me breathing. And there were a million times after I left Saoirse that I wished to God it never happened.

I'd been in love with August Salt since before I knew what the words meant. I don't know when it happened - the narrow space between seconds, when a spark like the birth of a hundred stars found a home in my blood. Since then, every day had been colored with the glittering light of it dragging me in its wake, pulling me beneath its surface. And I didn't care. If this was what it was like to drown, then for the rest of my life, I didn't want to take another sip of air.

I wasn't sure anymore which were memories and which were dreams. I'd lost track of that a long time ago.

After a lifetime of hungering for things to change, I’d settled into a life that I hoped never would.

There are spells for breaking and spells for mending, but there are no spells for forgetting.

I didn't know that teenagers didn't usually fall into that kind of love, or that there was anything unusual about us at all. I just knew that she felt like air to me.

There are spells for breaking and spells for mending. But there are no spells for forgetting,” I warned her.

While the outside world was burning their witches, we were here. On this island.

Because I'm somehow still connected to you. Like a part of me isn't there if you're not there. For years, I thought that would go away. It didn't.

She held on to me, her head tipping back with her lips pinched between her teeth, and it was the frst time I'd ever felt that pull- that soul-deep tide that drags you under until you can't breathe. It was the only time I had ever felt it. And I don't know if it was being young, or being stupid or if it was just what first love feels like, but I didn't want to stop.

There were times when I wondered if I'd dreamed it. If he'd ever been real or if he was a fragmented piece of my imagination, buried deep and painful within me like a splinter under the skin.

I may not have known how to find him, but he’d known where I was. He’d always known. August wasn’t lost. He wasn’t taken away or waiting for me somewhere. He never came back. He had never come back for me.

I knew it was crazy. That to anyone else, none of it would make sense. But Emery and I had always been something that didn’t make sense, and I’d lived long enough without her to worry about the risk of sounding like an idiot.

For fourteen years, it felt like I’d been counting down the minutes, the seconds, to a moment that I thought would never come. He was an ache inside of me that would never be soothed. And it was a pain I didn’t even want to be freed from.

I'd been eighteen years old. I'd known nothing about suffering or responsibility or loss, but somehow, I'd known this soul-deep king of love that I now wondered if most people never found. It cut open a vein in me that never stopped flowing.

She'd looked at me like she hated me as we stood in front of the burning truck, but there was also something comforting about it. It felt like before. When angry words between us had been like the waves that crashed around the island. It had never mattered what was said, because we always returned to each other. Like gravity.

Every autumn, when the crowds filled Main Street, I would watch out the window of my mother's shop and imagine him appearing in the stream of faces. More than once, I even thought I saw him. It took longer than I wanted to admit for me to realize that I couldn't cut him from me. That some part of him had been fused to places I couldn't even see.

I liked that, too, about cities. The fact that you could disappear.

It was customary to salt the earth where death had been to keep its shadow from spreading.

It was the time of year when the veil between worlds was thin, and in that moment, I could feel the tingle of the Otherworld tiptoeing lightly up my spine.

I’d lived enough years now to know that there were some ghosts that haunted you forever.

Those years blurred together, in a long swath of dark wind that swirled in my mind. A clumsy stitch of broken memories I was careful not to pull at the edges of. They were sleeping monsters. Hungry. But I'd still been afraid to lose them.

There was more than one secret on this island.

Magic was a tricky thing. Fickle. And the last time I’d used it, it had failed me. But this was a problem that had more than one kind of solution.

Is it true that it calls you back? The island?

Somewhere along the way, I fell in love with Emery in a way that was both too young and too naïve for. I could see that now. But the tangled roots of it were still buried deep beneath the surface of me, and that pain I felt when I saw her standing across the road was still there. It had always been there.

Everyone has a first love, Nixie." "Not like that, they don't.

A butterfly entering the house through a window. Spotting an owl in the daylight. The thin glow of a halo that sometimes circled the moon in winter.

The Herbarium

I'd lived enough years now to know that there were some ghosts that haunted you forever.

Milk-white moonlight flitted through the tree branches overhead, flashing over me like distant lightning.