But I was so weak I was returning to my original state. I did not share their appreciation of just how lucky I was. It certainly had been, but what happened if you’d never required that aim because you were born after that goal had been met? I was younger than the hosts. Yes, maybe that was the only aim you needed in life. Maybe the point was to exist with an absence of pain. Our beautiful, warless world, where I could be entranced by the purest mathematics for all eternity.Any human who arrived here, gazing at our violet landscapes, might well have believed they had entered Heaven But what happened in Heaven? What did you do there? After a while, didn’t you crave flaws? Love and lust and misunderstandings, and maybe even a little violence to liven things up?ĝidn’t light need shade? Didn’t it? Maybe it didn’t. And I was exactly how I had always been, among them, the hosts, feeling no pain and no fear. Heaven is a place where nothing ever happens I was back at home, on Vonnadoria, and it was exactly how it had always been. Hope is the thing with feathers That perches in the soul, And sings the tune without the words, And never stops at all. Footsteps behind me.Ěnd that was the last thing I heard before the darkness arrived to make its claim, along with remembered poetry, asĞmilyĝickinson shyly came towards me through the violet and whispered in my ear. I could feel myself about to collapse on to the glossy wet ground. I was being flooded with pain, and violet. It should have been a moment to savour, but it wasn’t. You saw the person, and the life inside them, if you saw the eyes.Ěnd I saw him, this messed-up, sensitive boy and felt, for a moment, the exhausted wonder of a father. His lips twitched, his bruised eyes moved like an egg about to hatch.

A defiant drumbeat of life.Ě back-beat, waiting for melody.

The humans matt haig pages