A City Inside h/c back

A quiet, contemplative and sublime gem, this contains what is possibly the most romantic sentence ever written:

"You gave up the sky for her."

The lines are crisp, the shadows deep and the night sky positively glows.

Told in the second person singular, a young woman casts her mind back across her life. It's so engrossing that you won't notice the switch in tenses on your first reading and, as it concludes, you may have forgotten where you came in so that the final three pages are truly startling.

There's always something truly magical in Walden's work, and at one point the woman finds herself suspended in the sky, living in the cup of a hollow sphere from the top of which billow curtains which are never truly closed. Can you imagine the view? Can you imagine the tranquillity?

"Then one day, you met her."

She was cycling through the sky.

"She was beautiful, wasn't she?"

And what did you do?

"You gave up the sky for her."

Obviously. Bittersweet does not even begin to cover this.

Only once is there more than a single sentence per panel – quite often there is silence instead – and within the recollection itself those panels are bordered only by what lies within. High in the sky, with the wind tossing the lanterns and tousling her hair, there are no borders at all.