“What’s it like?”

He glanced over at her, almost surprised at the sudden sound. “Hm?”

“What is it like to die?” she asked slowly.

“I don’t know,” he replied. “You just stop breathing, you can’t think. You start getting cold and everyone around you moves in slow motion.”

“I want to die, sometimes,” she said.

This took him short, and his throat tightened. “Why?”

“Do you always need a reason?”

“I don’t know.”

Violet regarded him with some amount of perplexity.

“You told me you were blind.”

“Yes,” said Shiloh.

“So you are blind?”

“Uh-huh.”

Violet was getting frustrated now. “So if you’re blind, why are you wearing glasses?”

Shiloh grinned. “Nobody ever sees it coming.”

“That’s the most insane thing I’ve ever heard,” snapped Violet.

“Why?” he asked. 

“Glasses are there to help people see better.”

“Yeah, so?”

“So, you’re blind, Shiloh!”

“They don’t make me see better. They make other people see. When I’m walking down the street with my tapper, everyone feels sorry for me. They look at me like I’m a dog with a missing leg. I’m that person a mother points out to her kid and says, ‘see? Be thankful for what you have, there are people who have it worse than you’. That’s all I am to them: something to feel sorry for.” He took off his thick-rimmed glasses and polished them on his shirt. “But with these, it makes them think about something else. You know? Instead of thinking, ‘Hey, look at that poor blind boy’, they’ll wonder why I would ever need these in the first place, just like you.” 

He placed them back on the bridge of his nose and took another pull from his cigarette. “Do you get it, Vi? To at least one other person in the world, I’m more than just a sad story. More than just some blind kid who’s got a bad heart and smokes too much. Anything but that.”

Fate fucked me.

“I’ve been thinking,” said Shiloh. “Everyone else—they think of dying as this sort of distant inevitable thing. They know it’s gonna happen, they know that someday they won’t be here anymore, and maybe they’re afraid of it, but no one thinks it’ll happen to them right here, right now—today, tomorrow, any time at all. But it can: people like you and me, we know that. We know it because we’ve seen it: sometimes more than anyone else. We know we’re gonna die, and we’re preparing for it—we’ve got expiration dates. Just like everyone else, I guess, but we know ours up-front and personally. Maybe we’re all temporary. You know? Maybe we’re just going through life invincible until the world lets us know we’re not.”
—The Moon in the Door, Helen Kelleher

Ralf, Saul, Benjamin & Shiloh

a heavy heart can be a difficult thing to carry, sometimes.

[ we’re all temporary ]

Shiilloohh

Eddie Redmayne as Shiloh Tucker