What do you want?”The question stunned him. He could say he wanted nothing, that he felt like nothing, that he counted the days until darkness. Hecould say: Happiness beyond all worlds! A life of peace and love, entire and whole! He could say he wanted everything and nothing all at once. He thought for a moment, as the birds sang in the trees, of how often he felt like this.

You cannot find peace by avoiding life, you know.” His mother smiled at him and sat across the table, spreading her papers around as if they were a tablecloth made of silken letters.

But now they were done running, lying, hiding, apologising, pretending. They were there because they wanted to be, because they had gotten there from years of fighting alone, and had stayed when they found they didn’t have to anymore.

Each night he would give up on sleeping in his pain and drowning in his silence; he would watch the few stars that were in the sky that night, but he would never be living them. Something has taken his warmth and replaced it with a starless sky.

I live in sin.” The winged boy’s eyes hadturned downwards, his soft mouth setting grimly with despair. “To kill myself I live. No longer my life my own, but sin’s; my good is given to me by heaven, my evil by myself, by my free will, of which I am deprived.

I’m fine,” is the reply he gives. I think I am surviving, in all the wrong ways, is the reply he thinks.

Nobody said that that admission, that truth, settled something within them—not a reassurance of purpose, but a profound, faraway recognition, something so deeply buried inside them that the only thing they felt was that tiny fragment of themselves, calmly and easily, open up.

Delight, pain, agony, ecstasy, rapture, woe—what curious things.He made himself promise to never ignore them again.

The walk to school was as long and treacherous as every other day. There was a humming in the restless summer air, and the boy of silver planes and ivory lines ducked his head and would rather listen to the secrets hidden inside the cracks of the pavement than watch how the clouds would sink into the ocean like boats.