Chapter 25
Twenty-Five
On a crystallized morning, inside your coming-along home, watching snow as soft and white as down feathers falling from the sky, you ask him: “What was it like?”
A hard question. He smiles as he thinks about it.
“It taught me humility,” he says. “It taught me there’s more to this world worth caring about than money and glory.
I never thought the plants that grow in the lakebed could taste better than a feast served on golden platters, but they did.
And to move through the water—to feel it part for you, to feel it roll off your back…
I didn’t know, until I was a swan, that it was possible to feel so intensely that I belonged in this world.
In this world, and to it. And the sky, Hans.
The sky. Sometimes at night, I’d take to the sky, and I’d open my mouth and pretend I was eating the stars. ”
“Is that what you were up to?” You never could have known, and your heart clenches. “I remember you doing that.”
“I’d pretend I was eating them, that I was full of stardust and glowing, so as I came back to earth I must have resembled a falling star. I used to hope someone near or far would make a wish on me. I felt so full of magic I thought I could make someone’s wish come true.”
He looks down at the mug of tea in his hand. His eyes are far away—years away, a different life away.
“I didn’t know I could be that happy,” he says.