Chapter 103
Davian
Happiest Year
Jaymes Young
With a satisfied smile, I closed the newspaper bearing the headline Major Fire Near Maplecrest.
On my last day in Virginia, I had taken my law books and driven to Quill’s old house.
I had burned them. I had burned them all.
And that was just one item on the bucket list I had checked off for her.
The first item now counted double, because not only had I carved wooden pumpkins, painted them, assembled them into a mobile for Lara and given it to her during my visit to the Halloween town where she now lived – and where she seemed to like it – a week ago, I had also put together a blue wooden box in which I kept all the things that had anything to do with Quill.
Dried ink tulips. Her dip pen nib necklace.
The ring she would never wear. Her ink bunny with the three bullets.
All her fountain pens. The Batteries of Ink edition she had annotated for me.
My typewriter key charm. One of her sweaters.
Her manuscripts. The Bryan Adams tape. A photo album with pictures of her and me, which Lara had secretly put together for me.
A new pack of the gummy fish she’d shared with me.
The Margaret Atwood book she’d given me on the bridge.
The little notes we’d sent each other. The new book. A paper crane…
With a gnawing feeling in my stomach, I had put batteries inside before locking the wooden box inside a strongbox and burying it as a time capsule behind a dune on the west coast. A hundred yards from my beach house.
Then I had written a letter to the Muse of Wonderland, put it into a bottle, and sent a message in a bottle across the Pacific toward Wonderland at sunset.
I had spent the entire night on the beach, gazing at the stars and imagining that she was the brightest one. Ever since, I always looked up at that star, which shone as if it were on the verge of burning out.
My setting sun.
Since I had moved near Seattle, I didn’t have much to do, so I wrote day and night, read books I had wanted to read for years but had always put off, took walks on the beach, and lived in the past, just as I did whenever I leafed through the photo album I had found in Quill’s old house.
It tore me apart to think about whether she had known that her mom had been collecting these pictures of her all those years.
Not once had I managed to flip through that album without crying, until I had stopped opening it at all because it dug too deep into the hole she had left in my chest when she had left.
Waves
Mr. Probz
I lowered the newspaper and faced the present, the three pages in front of me that I had written for Lara, read them, and tried not to lose my mind before slipping them into the envelope and writing Pumpkin on it in neat cursive.
Then I stood up and, with a proud smile, propped the letter against the glass water bottle from the only date night Quill and I had ever had.
There hadn’t gone a single night without me placing a white tulip in it and waking up to a blue one the next morning.
She had left so much ink behind.
But to no avail.
My ink batteries were empty.
Finally ready to check off the last item on my bucket list, I made my way up to my attic loft as the sun was setting, grabbed my first copy of the second volume of Batteries of Ink, and walked to the center of the room, where I sat down cross-legged, rolled up the sleeves of my white shirt, and opened the book.
She would never read it.
And I would never find peace in it.
Neither the time when Quill had been my yesterday nor the time when she had been my tomorrow had been the best. It was the time when she had been my now.
And that time was over. She wouldn’t come back.
Carefully, I tore off the first leaf of my book, separated it from the others, and examined the thin paper.
While writing and formatting, I had made sure the book would have a thousand leaves.
She had asked me for it.
With precision, I folded the top edge until the sheet of paper was square and I could begin folding.
After a minute, I held a paper crane in my hand, turned it in the light of the setting sun streaming through my gable end window, before letting it fly across the room.
I tore out the next leaf from my book. And the next…
And so I folded 1,000 paper cranes.
The sun set, the first New Year’s Eve fireworks lit up the sky in the distance above the coastline, and I kept folding. Between three candles that lit up my attic room.
At 23:23, I folded the last paper crane.
It was the smallest.
The last page of my book. Her page.
Gently, I pressed my lips to its wing, allowing myself to imagine it was her skin.
“I hope I made you proud.”
Then I let it fly, watching as it glided out through the open balcony door into the night where the coastal breeze swept it away.
For a while, I stared at the paper chaos surrounding me, fighting with all my might against the memories of last New Year’s Eve.
Then, when I couldn’t take it anymore, I finally gave in. And it felt like the first breath after an eternity to pull the razor blade from my shirt pocket.
I had waited a whole damn year for this.
I will come to you, my feather.
I will come home.
With tears streaming down my face, I pressed the blade against my left wrist.
“Your Ink…”
Without hesitation, I slashed the blade through my skin, pressing my lips together.
“My Veins.”
A cramping pain shot through my arm, causing an overwhelmed gasp to escape my lips.
At first, I stared in shock at the gaping slit from which blood was spurting, then I smiled through even more tears and got used to the intense pain with every passing second.
With my trembling, blood-smeared hand, which was gradually losing strength, I repeated the process on the other side before the blade slipped from my hand.
Through my tears, I let myself sink backward into the sea of paper cranes, closed my eyes, and spread my arms wide.
And it was as if the veil that had settled over all my feelings over the course of the last year was finally lifting from me, making room for the concentrated force of all those suppressed emotions.
Knowing I would never be able to truly live again, I had drifted away, drowned, yet without ever truly reaching the bottom of the sea. Without dying.
And finally, I understood Quill’s last words.
Loving Quill Veritas. That was the easiest and at the same time the hardest thing I had ever done. A feather in the wind. A fresh breeze in summer. A shadow…
Quill had been all of that.
But above all, she had been one thing.
Unreachable.
Saturn
Sleeping At Least
To all my Davians.
Keep writing.
The world needs your ink.
To all my Quills.
Keep breathing.
This world never deserved you.
But you deserve the world.
This book is not an end.
It’s a new beginning.
In this life.
And next.
ITLAN
M A E Z O S
Read only if you're a BLAIRVILLE reader
With this book, you've unlocked one of the four pieces of the BLUE & INKBIRD puzzle. Follow the paper cranes to put the rest of the puzzle together. You’ll find them between every line, in all ITLAN books.
I made sure of it. All similarities are intentional, and there are even deeper Easter eggs you’ll only understand after reading botanink or/and TBL or/and O.
M A E Z O S