Thrive

Her dad had told her that art was for posh people, but she liked how she felt staring at art and wanted more of it. More of that feeling. “Just standing in front of big old paintings calms me down." ... "How?" “How?” “Well, you stand in front of a Leonardo from, I don’t know, 1498, and it’s powerful because the painting is as it was then. The emotions and feelings of it are fresh. It hasn’t gone off. It is 1498 right there in front of you. The world grows old around art. But the art is still as powerful and fresh as it always was…

He always thought that to succeed in life you just had to keep spinning. Like a sycamore seed on the wind. And that the faster you spun the farther you’d reach. That, provided you kept accelerating, you could outrun scarcity, outrun your past, outrun your nightmares. Yet he saw now, watching his young self, the lengths he had gone to avoid what the tender part of his heart was really feeling. Would it have been impossible to stop moving forward for one moment and just sit, with his pain and shame and woe? To face it head on. It wouldn’t have been impossible—for instance—to just hold on to Sheffield and their life here. Or even to move away from the place but not from all the feeling.

“Kisses of unending depth. Bodies melting into thoughts and thoughts melting into bodies. Friends becoming something deeper. The fusion of worlds. The scent of skin and new carpet. The sudden stillness and silence when they thought they heard his mam. He remembered the feel of her voice warm in his ear as she said his name. He remembered a shared cigarette outside the window, their bodies wrapped in bedsheets. He remembered her head on his shoulder as she fell asleep. He remembered the happiness as he felt the soft slow tide of her breath. He missed it. He missed her. He missed her so much. He missed the adventures they had and the ones they never finished... They became their own island in the storm."

She smiled warmly and made room for Wilbur to sit next to her. It was the most natural thing in the world. That was one of the things he liked about her. The way she had an impulse to make the awkward feel normal. It was a kind of care. She was always that person. The one who was just in tune. The one who knew that life was easier if you cared about people. She just made life more natural.