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Did you count on your fingers as I spoke?
Did you count the reasons to quit?
I told you you’d be left with none.
thirty-five
By the end, I am sobbing.
I think I started somewhere in the beginning. Probably on the second word or something, but who is counting? Skye is practically holding me upright now, but I don’t even care.
I read it again. I cry some more.
Oh, Eden.
I should have been there for you, sweetheart.
“More,” I gasp as soon as I’ve read it again. I don’t bother wiping my eyes any more, what’s the point? They’ll be drowning in tears again in a second. “I need more.”
Skye takes my phone—his fingers are slightly shaking. He scrolls over to another poem, much smaller.
“My second-favorite one of hers,” he says.
I know he doesn’t read, but now that I’ve read the poem, I get it. I get why he would read all her stuff. Him and every single person in the world, reader or no reader.
I think I remember Eden talking dismissively about her poem’s award that it was ‘a pity award’. I get it now. She thinks that people pity her for what she’s gone through, for what she’s survived, and that’s why she got the award. Maybe she thinks that way about other things as well. Maybe that asshole destroyed her so much that she can’t see what an amazing person she is, and she keeps thinking that her story is all everyone sees.
I just want to raise him from the dead so I can kill him myself.
Is that a normal thing to think? It feels pretty normal to me. Pretty right.
The truth is that Eden won that award, as well as her job here, by being the most brilliant writer this decade has seen. By piercing everyone’s heart. By gutting them. They had to give her all the accolades after that—they had nothing else to give. She’d stolen their hearts already.
“Here you go.” Skye is handing me the phone back.
I read.
Beauty
Maybe beauty doesn’t exist at all
Maybe God didn’t make everything beautiful
Maybe God didn’t make some things beautiful
Maybe everything is ugly
But maybe just maybe
Maybe beauty only exists in our own hearts
Maybe what we decide is beauty is beauty:
The world around us, the stars, the oceans,
that tiny scar on my palm
that I got chasing after you in the woods
