softkaz:

one day, henrietta will forget.

the many sleepless nights it shared with the boy who was too small for the skin he wanted to carry will disappear from its memory. the walls of monmouth manufacturing will grow cold again, without the warmth of youth filling them up like a gentle sun, without noah’s silent presence. a latin exam with a hurried a+ on it in whelk’s dispassionate handwriting left behind in the trashcan in the bathroom will slowly become unidentifiable because of the dust and humidity. the smell of mint will fade, the ever-dirty bathroom mirror will never fog up with the heat of someone’s late-night shower again. the fridge will be taken out of the bathroom. monmouth manufacturing will stop being a home. 

300 fox-way will fade into the dozens of other brightly-colored houses in the neighborhood. the sign in front announcing the presence of psychics will start to fall apart with time, because the family that moves in after will never bother to get rid of it. the silent magic left by calla’s sharp existence and orla’s bubbling energy and the smell of maura’s teas and persephone’s soft being will disappear. the telephone will stop ringing. blue sargent’s room will be cleared of it’s clutter, until it become just a little space that holds nothing and no one at all. the things that set the little house apart will become just a thin silhouette lost in time. 

the little room above st. agnes church will be rented to other people with different dreams and different reasons to want to escape, but the door will never be pushed open by the same slender, hard-working hands. the old, ratty mattress will forget the shape of the sleepy, 3 am shadow of a boy. the mirror will forget the reflection of the determined eyes, and the smell of moss and want will disappear. the little place where the floorboard creaked whenever adam stepped on it will be fixed. the old cereal box will be left behind and eventually thrown away, and it will forget the almost invisible result of worry and desperation and desire it used to carry. 

the streets will forget the feel of ronan lynch’s car, and the air will never again feel the taste of kavinsky’s impossible dreams. aglionby will teach and house richer, more dangerous, prettier boys. they will have newer, faster, better cars. richard gansey the third’s camaro will take its last breath and it’s orange paint will fade until it is forgotten. 

only the trees will remember. but without the raven king, the trees no longer speak.