"Gabri," Dan repeats, getting it right. "My daughter's full name was Eliora, but she mostly went by Ellie or just El."
Which was an invention of her life with Dan, not her life with her family that predated him by so long. She didn't talk about her life before she met Dan, and he didn't talk about his. They bonded quickly when their lives collided in their shared present and an understanding that they were both running from something, and somewhere along the line she nestled herself into his heart in a way where she could never be fully removed. Somewhere in those years he started thinking of himself not just as her companion but as her guardian, then as her parent.
"You ain't bringing up bad memories. The memories are just there." He stops short of saying they're good memories, because good memories are even more painful than bad ones, he finds. Good memories are taunts. To him, when someone dies, their memory becomes an inverted photo, a negative, all the highlights turned into deep crevices to get lost in. "And it's been a few years."
It's not that that's a lie, technically, but to Dan it doesn't feel like it's been that long. Sometimes his grief sneaks up on him so quickly and furiously that he feels like he lost her just minutes ago, like he's still in shock, like he's waking up from dreaming the last few years only to find himself back at the moment she died.
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Which was an invention of her life with Dan, not her life with her family that predated him by so long. She didn't talk about her life before she met Dan, and he didn't talk about his. They bonded quickly when their lives collided in their shared present and an understanding that they were both running from something, and somewhere along the line she nestled herself into his heart in a way where she could never be fully removed. Somewhere in those years he started thinking of himself not just as her companion but as her guardian, then as her parent.
"You ain't bringing up bad memories. The memories are just there." He stops short of saying they're good memories, because good memories are even more painful than bad ones, he finds. Good memories are taunts. To him, when someone dies, their memory becomes an inverted photo, a negative, all the highlights turned into deep crevices to get lost in. "And it's been a few years."
It's not that that's a lie, technically, but to Dan it doesn't feel like it's been that long. Sometimes his grief sneaks up on him so quickly and furiously that he feels like he lost her just minutes ago, like he's still in shock, like he's waking up from dreaming the last few years only to find himself back at the moment she died.