The Un-death of Me -- Illustrated

Prologue

It was in the journey of pursuit that Avery attained possibilities of joy, of happiness -- rather than giving up a quest, she searched, aimed, fired, killed what’s detrimental, and experienced destruction akin to death, in order to resurrect herself to new forms of bliss. It's what went on in the world, and on the journey of pursuit that gave her peace, that turned the death of her old self into a rebirth, into the un-death of her.

Willa Cather once explained how it happened. When she found out how to take her journey, or to let her journey take her, she told stories about herself:

If there is one thing one can always yearn for and sometimes attain, it is human love…. You get to find your own way to dig out a heart and shake it off and hold it up to the light again. We all are…. Trying to invent our version of the story. All human odes are essentially one. “My life: what I sole from history, and how I live with it.”

Like a story Avery told herself and the world, like a story unfolding in a book -- with luck, life came