He does not mean that it does not hurt. He does not mean that we are not frightened. Only that: we are here. This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet. This is what it means to be alive.

The sun was high, and the island bloomed wildly, fruits swelling on their branches, new green growth leaping from every crook and crevice. She looked at ease amid that profusion, waving to us, calling her greetings.

Pulse by pulse, his life passed under my fingers. “Thank

I would go on through the countless millennia, while everyone I met ran through my fingers and I was left with only those who were like me.

But I only embraced him a final time, pressing hard as if to set him into my skin.

aureate

Girls and boys would sigh over him, but all I saw were the thousand soft places of his body where his life might be ended. The bareness of his neck looked obscene in the firelight.

He could not imagine the scope of gods, the mercilessness that comes of seeing generations rise and fall around you.

hair, cradling some scrap of old tunic he had left behind. Crying out for the loss of half my soul.