Authors: Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone
The most excruciatingly lovely story I’ve read. Fates interwoven in the threads of time. Forever yours. Do I have you still? Stars rose (they are a rose, right?) Making home in a carved off pocket of time, between the worlds. Love, becoming the other, being alone, together. The physics of us. Wanting to meet you in every place I’ve loved.
thoughts
- Every time I leaf through this book I tear up and feel sentimental without fail
- I think they perfectly captured love and longing in words
- “I want to be alone together”
- I am so engrossed in this prose and narrative. Beautiful, two entities, smaller parts of a whole, weaving in and out of time, crossing paths, woven into each other. Love, intensity, hunger, surrender, satiation.
quotes
It occurs to me to dwell on what a microcosm we are of the war as a whole, you and I. The physics of us. An action and an equal and opposite reaction. – p. 36
There’s a kind of time travel in letters, isn’t there? I imagine you laughing at my small joke; I imagine you groaning; I imagine you throwing my words away. Do I have you still? Do I address empty air and the flies that will eat this carcass? You could leave me for five years, you could return never — and I have to write the rest of this not knowing. – p. 42
The sun set. The stars rose. (They are a rose, right? Or something? Dante said that.) – p. 62
Her pen had a heart inside, and the nib was a wound in a vein. She stained the page with herself. She sometimes forgets what she wrote, save that it was true, and the writing hurt. But butterfly wings break when touched. Red knows her own weaknesses as well as anyone. She presses too hard, breaks what she would embrace, tears what she would touch to her teeth. – p. 86
Letters are structures, not events. Yours give me a place to live inside. – p. 95
I want to be a body for you.
I want to chase you, find you, I want to be eluded and teased and adored; I want to be defeated and victorious — I want you to cut me, sharpen me. I want to drink tea beside you in ten years or a thousand. Flowers grow far away on a planet they’ll call Cephalus, and these flowers bloom once a century, when the living star and its black-hole binary enter conjunction. I want to fix you a bouquet of them, gathered across eight hundred thousand years, so you can draw our whole engagement in a single breath, all the ages we’ve shaped together. – p. 129
I veer rhapsodic; my prose purples. – p. 130
But when I think of you, I want to be alone together. I want to strive against and for. I want to live in contact. I want to be a context for you, and you for me. – p. 130
- Reminds me of Rilke’s quote Love is rooted in solitude
I want to meet you in every place I have loved. – p. 142
I love you. I love you. I love you. I’ll write it in waves. In skies. In my heart. You’ll never see, but you will know. I’ll be all the poets, I’ll kill them all and take each one’s place in turn, and every time love’s written in all the strands it will be to you. – p. 150