Later, when she thinks back on it, Cassie will say: The world went funny for a while.
No one likes to talk about it, oh nobody, the time when Cassie was crazy, when they had to keep Cassie home from school because she was hearing voices in her head and couldn’t get her body back where it needed to be, that is, stuck in the kind of time that everyone else was stuck in. Everyone was so worried then, scared of the way that Cassie floated through the world, unmoored to it, above it and of it and inside it, Cassie growing from the world but without roots.
Cassie, when she thinks back on it, thinks she had never been in danger. Cassie had never been afraid.
*
She came unstuck when she was twenty. That’s how she said it and that’s how she thinks about it, even now: unstuck. Everybody else was stuck but not Cassie. For Cassie everything was liquid and nonlinear, an ellipses. No hard stops.
Everyone was so worried. Priam came home, took extended leave from his fancy government job, and slept on a little bed in her room because they were too afraid to leave her on her own.
“Oh Cassie,” said her mother oh Cassie, everything oh Cassie. Cassie looked at the wood on the table and saw the tree they felled to make it, tall and lustrous . . . Cassie heard the crack of the hammer, the joy of the felling. The tree had laughed as it fell, a great loud crack of laughter, and now it is a table and Cassie can run her fingers along its edges and it is laughing still, great big tree saying Oh Cassie oh Cassie.
But there was no way to explain it. Priam, dear and hovering and worried, too stuck in time to understand when she said that he was a good brother, that he would die beautifully and live carefully and that in 2035 he would lose everything and have again to build it, again have to build it, build again to have it, her brother would always be the nexus of collapse and the seed of rebirth, her brother was always losing things he’d been too afraid to put down, Cassie tried to tell him but Priam said, “Cassie, you’re doing it again, did you take your medication?” So Cassie took her medication and didn’t tell her brother that she could see to the bones of him, the love that he sheltered and nurtured and gave away, that she could see how brightly he shone and how the light invited shadows. Cassie said Priam one day your son will die and you will kiss the hand of the man who killed him and it will be his own hand, Priam do you understand that we cannot always keep the ones we love, we cannot keep them when they want to rip themselves away, you will dissolve into dust for twelve days and then you will coalesce again and keep moving forward, you will have to, those who chose to live have chosen to always go forward. Priam do you understand.
Priam said, Cassie I said did you take your medication?
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