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Simile
Explanation and Analysis—A Page of Time:
When Kya (who has already started seeing Chase) runs into Tate unexpectedly, she feels her strength dramatically leaving her body. Owens uses simile and metaphor to describe the intensity Kya’s of reaction when she sees Tate after years apart:
She hung like a sail where the wind just went out. Tate was more than her first love: he shared her devotion to the marsh, had taught her to read, and was the only connection, however small, to her vanished family. He was a page of time, a clipping pasted in a scrapbook because it was all she had. Her heart pounded as the fury dissipated.
Kya feels a rush of complicated emotions when she sees Tate again after he left her to go to college. The love and fury that rush over her and just as suddenly abate are like a gust of powerful wind. The simile “hung like a sail where the wind just went out” compares Kya’s sudden loss of agency over her body to a sail hanging uselessly from a mast. This moment shows how Tate’s sudden and unexpected presence overwhelms her and leaves her feeling drained and uncertain. The effect he has on her is instantaneous; she's been waiting to see him for years, even if she can't admit it.
The other metaphors in this passage call Tate a “page of time” and a “clipping pasted in a scrapbook.” Scrapbooks are meant to preserve memories so that people can look back and reminisce about things they want to hold on to. By describing Tate as a “page of time,” the author shows how Kya was forced to distance herself from memories of him after he left her. Because she couldn’t have him in real life, remembering him was “all she had.” This idea shows how important Tate is to Kya’s sense of self. When she sees him again, she’s suddenly confronted with a living reminder of everything she has lost. Rather than living her life in the present, she looks back at the "scrapbook" of her heartbreak when Tate left.
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