Helena > Recent Status Updates

"It's our flame," said a third voice, higher than the other Jacks. A Jack with flowing, shadowy hair stepped into view and gestured to the large, merry fire behind Cricket. "It's attracted to Interesting Things and Beings of Character," they explained, as if this were totally normal, and in fact, all ships were actually giant pumpkins with mysterious wills of their own.

I stayed in the mouth of the dragon for a long time. It was comforting in a strange way to be in hell, to be at the very bottom and know that there was nothing farther below me.

Who needs the oath-like balance of exertion and reward when all you need is a charger, free Wi-Fi, free re-fills, annual leave. What chance does the miracle of a hedgerow have against the splendor of an EasyJet flight to Spain, an arrow shooting across the sky chock-full of manchildren plugged in and streaming—airplane not just an airplane but a flying phone charger.

…the world out there and the placement of ourselves within it…was all that mattered, and that if sodomy was a sin then it was a sin like all the others in the sense that sin was a sign of caution, a warning that served as a guardrail between our world and whatever greater thing lay beyond it, both in unknowable great joy and unattainable great peril, and the timeless, crushing responsibility of devotional love…

The air was sweet with sound, manure, herbs, rot, fruity fragrance, animal hair. There was no car exhaust, no petrol fumes, no plastic waste lining the river. Yes, there were decapitated, mutilated human heads on spikes hung across the entrance to the City - that was a shocking thing to see…but people passing the display all shared the same wincing, perplexed reaction as me. It was all still a shared humanity.

And what we are seeing now are the memories you never lived but which are inside you, facts pressed deep into you from before you even heard them…He had imagined the event a thousand times over, had spent countless hours as a child staring up to the clouds and thinking about it, wondering what his father had thought in his final moments. It was a strange thing, to grieve someone he had never known.

And it was really nothing at the time, this contentment. It Aowed through their open fingers like a stream, and they imagined it would always be like this, and that the stream would never dry up. It would just flow and flow and they would never have to think about where it came from. And never make the effort to scoop it up and drink it in, as if life could stay a honeymoon forever.

Without the truth, there can be no fiction.
Nonsense needs reason. To push against. I didn't howl at the moon, I yelled at a lamp. Subject verb. Someone wept. Some things are more important than poetry.

When you build on a graveyard everything is a graveyard, and everything is a graveyard because nothing is free from history. It foods the landscape, it burns the cities to the ground. Tell someone to get over it and you've made yourself an enemy, but you have to get over it. There is no room, there is no new room. The fire is not moving away. The smoke billows.

Galileo got a telescope. He used it to move the sun to the center of the universe. We arrested him and banned his books. Socrates had a question. Well, several questions. We gave him poison. Van Gogh had a paintbrush. He struggled with yellow. He was 700 things on a small shelf, touching. When he died he was survived by everything that was left.

When they wake, it's dark. They cry, the moon rises, the pebbles shine—my father does not like this part-and by dawn, they're back. This is the part that I don't like: They went back. When someone is trying to kill you, you shouldn't go back. Second night, same plot: Ditch the kids.
They are the parents. They don't need to be inventive. The door is locked. No pebbles.

Surely it was a misunderstanding, a simple sloppiness. It wasn't. It was a staircase down and darker.

No one believes that I know what I know because sometimes I miss a part or tell it sideways. Some people get stuck on the first thing you say and they don't let you finish your syllogism. They asked the wrong questions. I gave the wrong answers.

"You're like a rose in a graveyard," he said, and his lips twisted into a bitter smile. "I wonder what you could have turned into without the war."

I didn't know what would happen when we first met. I didn't know that it'd be a lifetime. I hoped it would, I think. At least part of me did. I couldn't even tell you why. But there was something about you, something I wanted…There's no fate, no destiny. Sometimes it is horrible, devastating. But sometimes, it could lead to a life we couldn't have predicted. A good life, even if it hurts.

Coming together to make something so impossible, something so human, and then sending it to the stars. We filled it with so much of what makes us tick that it's overwhelming. But isn't it a lie? Say that the records are found. They're listened to. Were heard, even though there's no one left to confirm. What will those beings think? That we were loving, kind, and hopeful? Is that what we deserve?

She talks to the locals as though she invented them.

I wonder when I will catch up to the life that started the moment I lost you.

Deep in the summer, there will be mornings so sunny and bright that I won't feel anything but grateful, and I won't do anything but smile. I hold on to this thought on mornings like this, when the day stretches out ahead of me, intimidatingly empty.

I can't help but get lonely for you when I’m supposed to be happy. It feels inescapable. If I can't even enjoy myself in the good times, then when am I going to enjoy myself? When is the weight of all this going to go away?

I always seem to be one emotion away from what everyone else is feeling. I want to be on the same page as everyone. To have an identical experience of reality. To be moored to the same comprehensible and solid emotions as they are.

Lily could look at Kath forever, but looking was not enough. She wanted nothing more than to touch Kath, but the space between them seemed to buzz warningly. They were on top of Russian Hill now, on top of the city itself, completely exposed.

“Where?” Lily asked. “Where can we go?”

It was a senseless sort of dance, artful and confused. Blue and Maura had their own orbit; Maura and Calla another. He watched Maura's bare feet circle on the kitchen floor. It was the opposite of everything he had cultivated for the past five years. How he wanted to stay. This isn't a life for what you are, he told himself. But for tonight, he would pretend.

This lived in him. This punch, the first time his father had ever hit him, was always being thrown somewhere in his head.

He didn't want to kidnap a boy, he didn't want to anger Maura, he wanted...he just wanted. Cicadas sang madly from the trees. It was so impossibly summer. He wanted to stay.

She beamed at him. She had one of those lovely, open, perfect smiles, genuinely happy and very beautiful. The Gray Man thought, This is the worst decision I've ever made.

“There wasn't a day during his first month at Aglionby Academy when he hadn't doubted his decision to come there. The other boys were so alien and daunting; he would never be able to look like one of them. How incredibly naive he'd been to think he would ever possess a room like one of the other Aglionby students did.” Me @ Rollins

He looked nothing like the Adam who'd lost his temper and everything like the Adam she had first met. That was what was frightening, though — there d been no warning.

Noah had not been Catholic when he was alive, but recently he had decided to find religion. No one in the church ever noticed him and it was possible God didn't, either, but Ronan, as someone God possibly ignored as well, didn't mind the company.

Adam knew it was a favor. Did that make it wrong? He'd said no for so long that he didn't know when to say yes…He hated the careful way Gansey had asked him about it. Tiptoeing, just like Adam had learned to tiptoe around his father. He needed a reset button. Just push the reset button on Adam Parrish and start him again.