Isabella

“Your eyes
I saw differently when I looked with your eyes. I walked differently when I walked with your body. I wanted to show you clean things. Before brutality, sadness, despair, filth, pain, clean things that were only for you, clean things above all. But it didn’t come off as I intended. Again and again I peered into your eyes, as though searching for form in a deep, black mirror.
If only we’d been living in a city back then, I heard my mother say several times during my childhood.
If only an ambulance could have taken me to hospital.
If only they’d put her in an incubator, that tiny rice cake of a baby. They were a new thing then, incubators.
If only you hadn’t stopped breathing. And had therefore been granted all this life in my stead, I who would then never have been born. If it had been granted to you to go firmly forwards, with your own eyes and your own body, your back to the dark mirror.”
― Han Kang, The White Book

“You make me want to live, Rowan. Not survive; not exist; Live.”
― Sarah J. Maass

“From now until darkness claims us.”
― Sarah J. Maas, Heir of Fire

“This life needed only one of us to live. If you had lived beyond those first few hours, I would not be living now.
My life means yours is impossible.
Only in the gap between darkness and light, only in that blue-tinged breach, do we manage to make out each other’s faces.”
― Han Kang, The White Book