Some sentences, paragraphs and excerpts from artifice's the texture of memory, just to showcase how incredibly beautiful the language is (and to demonstrate why I may never get over this fic):
... being at the apartment has the same effect as submerging himself underwater—all the world a muted blue.
Deductive form, modus tollens. If he was out there, he’d let Ilya know, somehow. He hasn’t let Ilya know. Therefore, he is not out there. But he is everywhere, in the icy pavement and the sunset sky and every cell composing the makeup of Ilya’s mortal, aging body, and the mere idea that he does not walk the Earth is one that Ilya profoundly, violently rejects. Reductio ad absurdum. He must be alive.
He seems to lose his mind around this point every year anyway. Nobody wants to be around half a person. Nobody needs to know.
The ghost in his head is only that: a ghost.
Remember that one time you left me alone for eight years? I ran away from your ghost and all I got was this sweater.
Were they the happiest couple in the world? No, of course not. They had their gripes with one another, same as any other couple. They loved each other, and that was the most important thing. Ilya had expressed iterations of the same sentiment over and over again, each answer more worn than the last. To the police: We were perfectly fine. The only thing he ever complained about was his knee and my laundry. To the press: I love him. I pray every day and night that he’s found. To Yuna and David: I think he was restless and wanted a schedule again, but he was still happy. He’d never have disappeared on his own. To Anya’s grave: Why did you leave me behind, too?
Strangely, he has the sensation of being two people crammed into one.
“What do you want to hear?” His voice cracks in perfect harmony with the fractures around Ilya’s heart. “I can pretend for the rest of our lives. He loves you enough. He’s me.” So is the haunting in my head. So is the wind when I’m alone on the highway. So is the silence in the early morning on Mont Royal, between the crosses, every row. Every fragment of Shane’s beautiful soul is everywhere if Ilya only looks.
If everything that will be has already been decided, if free will is non-existent, he’d thought, he would make the most of the present.
“—I keep chasing the sound of your voice.”
“It’s good to know that I remain your husband,” Shane murmurs, and his voice is almost drowned out by the piano. “Because I’m still not convinced this isn't entirely a dream, and I’m going fucking crazy.” Would it be so terrible if it were? Part of Ilya wants to know, because at least they’d be dreaming together. They could dream within a dream, find a way to live forever in it, make up for all the lost time. If it were a dream, they could return together with no consequences, and Yuna and David would welcome them with frail, open arms, and the press wouldn’t say a thing.
Does it fucking kill you too, Shane had asked him once. He’d answered in the negative at the time, but that was then. You, he wants to say now, grabbing their bags from the trunk, you’re fucking killing me now.
“If I want to melt into you, crawl inside your veins and collapse us together,” he says, calmly, “so that you will never be anything that isn’t me or made by me, that is a sick fuck.”
At the top of the mountain, the sky is the most vibrant blue there is. I met you there the day after a game, once. We raced up wooden steps like children. You were the city personified, and I’d fallen in love with you, and with your cracked sidewalks, and with your blooming summers. I think you loved me back. My meanstreak, my big mouth. I was a spider lily in the night, littered over gravestones, and you were the sunrise. I’d look up and see all your wishes as airplanes in the sky. In the dark, we’d drift apart, and in the morning, I’d reach for your light. We’d bracket our secrets in the space between us, flower to the sun. My genesis, my love. Then one day, the sun forgot to rise again. The moon lingered, uncertain, as did the stars, who teetered on the edge of the sky. It must have been an accident; only, the sun never got out of bed. Wake up and come home, said the stars. Come home so the flowers can have colour again.
It’s barely 9 PM, but Ilya will be chasing sleep for the rest of his life, and he’s so fucking tired of the cold, he’ll take an anonymous hotel room over it. Miraculously, deliriously—and proving Svetlana right, that vacations do, somehow, help—he also wants to go home. He wants to return to their shitty Montreal apartment that they lived in together for a year, that he kept as a living tomb, and he wants to open the door to their old bedroom and do laundry. He wants to dust the shelves and find a place for The Great Gatsby. He wants to open their million windows to let the air in. He’s in Sydney fucking Cape Breton, Nova fucking Scotia, realizing that the home he’d been chasing obsessively was with him all along.
Ilya tsks. “No pictures! You burn this in your memory, right now.” Shane falters, lowering the camera from his face. “I could forget again.” Which is patently ridiculous. Even when he forgot everything, he still remembered the shape of Ilya beside him, all the pieces of his life forming an outline around his absence.
"I think I’ve committed the unforgivable sin of self-invention."
All that you love will be carried away, but sometimes, you can take comfort in the reminders. His shoes are still coarse with debris from Martinique Beach. There’s a hoodie in his bag from Rivière-du-loup, two books on the seat beside him, and crumbs from Cape Breton. Like a crashing wave to shore, he embraces it all.
