Bokelskere.no

For every inch of skin, there is memory. Devils are so made. Saints, too, if you believe in them. His humanity has been broken as an old walking stick that once held up a crippled man named Thomas. He realizes the stick and the man are one thing and he can fall. He has violated the laws beneath the laws of men and countries, something deeper, the earth and the sea, the explosions of trees. He has to care again. He has to be water again, rock, earth with its new spring wildflowers and its beautiful, complex mosses.

Now ocean and tears become one. It is the same element.

Remembering, in Spanish, means to pass something through the heart again, and now all the years are going through his heart again as he tries to turn away from the ocean. But he hears it and he knows it is out there. Some sleepless nights he goes out. But this night in his sleep he says, "Oh, look at all those beautiful life rafts."

I am earth, he thinks now. That's why I lived. I became the earth. This became his way of surviving.

All the stories live in our bodies, he thinks. Every last one.

When men decide in their secretly dark or hungry hearts to work their own will, there is little that can stop them. They have inner weather, sometimes unpredictable.

There were times when the light of the moon had gone out and she felt a great loneliness. It wasn't for herself. It was for what had happened to the grasses of their land, their waters, not just the massacre there, the slavery, but the killing of the ocean.

Happiness was not always a fleeting thing, but a state of mind, of being, having lived, loved, even after being poor, alone, having survived. Even with the pain in her hands she had happiness.

Oblivion, she thought. That was the world she lived in. It was what they should name some countries, towns, and places.

The war was like an ocean, an ocean where everyone burned or drowned, and only a few could swim it.