New Moon

"You try very hard to make up for something that was never your fault. [...] You didn't choose this kind of life, and yet you have to work so hard to be good."

"I don't know that I'm making up for anything," he disagreed lightly. "Like everything in life, I just had to decide what to do with what I was given."

I felt the smooth wooden floor beneath my knees, and then the palms of my hands, and then it was pressed against the skin of my cheek. I hoped that I was fainting, but, to my disappointment, I didn't lose consciousness. The waves of pain that had only lapped at me before now reared high up and washed over my head, pulling me under.

I did not resurface.

Tonight the sky was utterly black. Perhaps there was no moon tonight — a lunar eclipse, a new moon.

A new moon. I shivered, though I wasn't cold.

Dazed and disoriented, I looked up from the bright red blood pulsing out of my arm — into the fevered eyes of the six suddenly ravenous vampires.

I was like a lost moon — my planet destroyed in some cataclysmic, disaster-movie scenario of desolation — that continued, nevertheless, to circle in a tight little orbit around the empty space left behind, ignoring the laws of gravity.

Once you cared about a person, it was impossible to be logical about them anymore.

I'd never seen anything more beautiful — even as I ran, gasping and screaming, I could appreciate that. And the last seven months meant nothing. And [Edward's] words in the forest meant nothing. And it did not matter if he did not want me. I would never want anything but him, no matter how long I lived.

Time passes. Even when it seems impossible. Even when each tick of the second hand aches like the pulse of blood behind a bruise. It passes unevenly, in strange lurches and dragging lulls, but pass it does. Even for me.

One thing I truly knew — knew it in the pit of my stomach, in the center of my bones, knew it from the crown of my head to the soles of my feet, knew it deep in my empty chest — was how love gave someone the power to break you.

I had been broken beyond repair.

"Before you, Bella, my life was like a moonless night. Very dark, but there were stars — points of light and reason. ...And then you shot across my sky like a meteor. Suddenly everything was on fire; there was brilliancy, there was beauty. When you were gone, when the meteor had fallen over the horizon, everything went black. Nothing had changed, but my eyes were blinded by the light. I couldn't see the stars anymore. And there was no more reason for anything."