The last thing I remember: nestling up close to him, as close as I could get, the front of my knees locked into the back of his, burying my face in his shoulder blades, thinking that his skin smelled like skies heavy with rain.
A man always wants his friends to be a little in love with his beloved too.
I had started to believe that I might love her in some way. I came to her room late at night once when I was drunk, shouting, throwing myself at her because I wanted her to respect me more that I thought she did. I wanted her to want me more than she did- I mean, I didn’t want her to look at me as if I were a child, I wanted her to look at me with hunger.
They understand that annoyance is a fair price to pay for the strange protective love of the family.
He was an extremely intelligent boy-slash-man from a working- to middle-class family – from what, if he got drunk enough, he called trash – and those two biographical coordinates have always worked on me the way a handsome face never could. His weekly emails to the staff were small masterpieces chiseled out of wit, both anarchic and dry, and what I suspected was creeping intellectual boredom.
Everyone has their own New York, and this was ours.
To be a mother meant to die inside, constantly, so that everyone else could live. No thanks.