Something about giving in without a fight felt wrong.
You hold on to old experiences: injuries, injustices, and great love affairs, too. And you hold them in your joints and your organs, and wear them on your skin.
He just wanted to look at her and know her life was marching along under the same arch of time and space as he is.
We forgive and forget. At least I forgive and he forgets.
Someday was the thing he had, because it was a lot harder to ruin than today.
You should find him because he loves you.
But I know this. We’re ready to move forward again in our way. Together or apart, no matter how far apart, we live in one another. We go on together.
It was like a dream you might have after death in which lost people came back to life, your friends loved you again no matter what you had done, and your failures were unaccountably forgiven.
All I could think to do was love her. That’s all a person can do.
Pain is fear, and I’m not afraid.
Maybe it didn’t matter if you were a world-famous heartthrob or a painful geek. Maybe it didn’t matter if you friend was possibly dying. Maybe you just got through it. Maybe that was all you could ask for.
I love that blurry place where life’s transitions are made without you even knowing it.
A lot of friendship is about practice, that’s something I’ve learned as I’ve gotten older. It’s not simply some spiritual soul-bond of memories and longings, it’s really about having coffee every week, or talking on the phone every day or every other day – whatever suits you.
Age is not so much a feature of your character, as the spot where you stand for a pretty fleeting time on the arc of your life.
I think pants have unique qualities, especially in a woman’s life. Whatever bodily insecurities we have, we seem to take out on our pants.
What happened to me by myself felt partly dreamed, partly imagined, definitely shifted and warped by my own fears and wants. But who knows? Maybe there is more truth in how you feel than in what actually happens.
But it was smell that carried memory.
She felt like parts of her soul were missing, had left her body long ago. It had happened not in Greece three months ago, but long before that. It was in Greece that she’d realized those parts had left her and were not coming back.
Her vision of the world under the water represented a beautiful stillness, a version of heaven. It was the lost city of Lena, her alternate universe, the life she yearned for but didn’t get to have.
I love the idea of fictional worlds kind of all cohering in some way.