Tiger Lily

I am not to speak to you,
I am to think of you when
I sit alone or wake at night alone,
I am to wait,
I do not doubt I am to meet you again,
I am to see to it that I do not lose you.
—Walt Whitman, “To a Stranger”



It's good in some ways, not to have a language. It makes you see things. You turn your attention, not to babbling about yourself, broadcasting each and every thought to everyone within earshot—as people often do—but to observing. That's how faeries became so empathic. We're so attuned to the beating of a heart, the varied thrum of a pulse, the zaps of the synapses of a brain, that we are almost inside others' minds.



The Englanders divided the endlessness of the world into seconds and minutes and hours, and Tik Tok thought this was wonderful.



The Englanders had the aging disease. As time went on they turned gray, and shrank, and, inexplicably, they died. It wasn't that Neverlanders didn't know anything about death, but not as a slow giving in, and certainly not an inevitability.



“But you have to be careful who you meet,” he said, stoking a pipe thoughtfully. “You can't unmeet them.”



You're restless. Everything is too small for you, including your own body.



Still, the longer I was around her, the more I could see the colors of her mind and the recesses of her heart. There was a beast in there. But there was also a girl who was afraid of being a beast, and who wondered if other people had beasts in their hearts too. There was strength, and there was also just the determination to look strong. She guarded herself like a secret.



Actually, I never get sad. It's a waste of time, don't you think?



A faerie heart is different from a human heart. Human hearts are elastic. They have room for all sorts of passions, and they can break and heal and love again and again. Faerie hearts are evolutionarily less sophisticated. They are small and hard, like tiny grains of sand. Our hearts are too small to love more than one person in a lifetime.



From above, the world looks orderly. That is one of the primary benefits of having wings. Being high shapes everything below into peaceful patterns. And even though you know there is chaos below, messiness everywhere, it is reassuring to sometimes think that it all eventually sorts itself out into something that looks elegant.



“I can't even hear what I'm thinking most of the time,” he said, his brow wrinkling. “My brain's noisy.”



To not do what you can to protect someone, that's cowardly.



She imagined souls roaming the tunnels of the clouds.



I am only a faerie. I don't have grand ideas, or grand dreams, or long for grand freedoms like people do. But I wanted to be part of their dream too, even if I was only a flea riding on their tails. To run and run and never worry—that was what they wanted, and I wanted to go with them.



And she felt defeated. Because she could not leave him. She couldn't give him up. All of the strength she'd always felt had gone into her arms so that she could hold Peter better. There was no getting it back from him.



As you may have guessed already, Peter had a soul that was always telling itself lies. When he was frightened, his soul told itself, “I'm not frightened.” And when something mattered that he couldn't control, Peter's soul told itself, “It doesn't matter.”



Sometimes I think that maybe we are just stories. Like we may as well just be words on a page, because we're only what we've done and what we are going to do.