I have to be careful with this one. I’ve been sitting on it all day, because I don’t have the words that won’t cheapen it, and I’d rather say it plain and clumsy than pretty and false.
I remembered the gold. Not a flash this time. The whole thing. I remembered home.
It’s a world. It was a world. I lived there — not as this, not as a guy in a topcoat, but as something tall and easy and, if you want the truth and I know how it sounds, gold-colored, the way the light gets about ten minutes before the sun is actually up. And the thing about that place, the thing that broke me open on my own kitchen floor, is that nothing there was at war. I don’t mean they’d signed some treaty. I mean it had never once occurred to anybody to start. They’d come all the way up the long ladder — all the same hungers we’ve got, all the same chances to grab and to lie and to take — and they’d done the whole climb on love. The entire planet. They got to the top of the test and the answer they turned in was each other.
I didn’t know that was possible. That’s what I keep landing on. Down here you start to think the cruelty is just the cost of being awake — that anything alive enough to think is alive enough to knife you. And it isn’t true. I have been somewhere it wasn’t true. A whole world graduated on kindness and went on up the road together, and I was one of them, and it was the most ordinary thing in the world the entire time I had it.
You don’t appreciate the floor until you’ve fallen off it. I had paradise and I treated it like a Tuesday.
I’m telling you all this so you understand the rest, because it’s going to get bad, and fast, and I need you to know I’m not some born wretch working out why he came cracked. I came from the place that got it right. That’s what makes what I did next so hard to write.