I feel like I’ve done something right in taking her here.
I don’t know why, but I feel like something happened to her, like there’s pain behind her smile.
If this were a short story, it would mean something.
It was quiet, maybe, but it wasn’t simple.
I try to determine what the feeling is between us at the moment, and hope that something has changed, that we could be, for a little while, at ease with each other.
But even if I had already been kissed by dozens of mouths, I would have known this was different.
I hope you don’t get in trouble, I said, but how could trouble find us? We were miraculous.
The end of the world never sounded so good.
But it was everything I wanted, because I chose it to be mine.
I could say the night felt magical, but that would be embellishment. That would be romanticization. What it actually felt like was life. We weren’t thinking of what would happen next. No one talked about the way the summer was supposed to unfold or the places we’d find ourselves in the fall. It was as if we had made a pact to be in the moment, or like being in the moment was the only way to be.
So, I tell him everything about her, which feels like telling him about myself, because when you think about something so intensely for so long, it kind of has a way of taking over everything else.
Even though there are no true beginnings in life – there’s always something that came before – there are definitely moments that feel like a beginning, and it’s always good to stop and take a second to enjoy them.
The moral in case you haven’t come to it yourself, is that sometimes it’s enough just to put something out into the world.
I’m trying to figure myself out. I keep failing.
The whole world was out there, but I was in my mother’s arms, and I didn’t know it yet.
And in our house, we enjoyed our togetherness but we enjoyed our apartness, too.
There was an intimacy to the moment, not a loneliness.
You are still you.
San Francisco always felt like an island to me, surrounded by the mythical East Bay with its restaurants and parks and North Bay with its wealth and its redwoods. South of the city was where our dead were buried – but not my mother, whose ashes returned to the ocean that killed her, which was also the ocean she loved. South of that were little beach towns, and then Silicon Valley and Stanford. But the people, everyone I knew, everyone I’d ever known, all lived in the city.
His eyes were yellow as daisies. He’d been coughing up blood. He looked like a skeleton, sitting there next to me.