This was before I knew that the timing of a cruel thing does not make it more or less cruel, before I knew that only good way to hurt someone is never.
It’s not dissimilar to the reality-TV-show contestant’s ungrammatical attempt to appear grammatical, a quirk of using the subject pronoun after a preposition, instead of the correct object version. So: You have to choose between Brad or I.
The reality of an image both expands and narrows the imagination. It breathes, inhaling the new understanding and exhaling the old one.
Love is agreeing to live in someone else’s narrative.
Just because something ends prematurely doesn’t mean it won’t end eventually. Usually that’s exactly what it means.
You’ll find there are certain fragile truths every couple has.
The city was a parade of places shut down, left early from, arrived late to, sat in front of, met to say goodbye at. This is how it was for everyone. If you wait long enough, anyplace will become a barracks of the romantic undead, a sprawling museum of personal bombs.
Men, who can be so oblivious in most arenas, are very good a knowing when a woman’s heart has left the building.
It’s unfortunate, I thought, how some of the world’s most productive conversations are breakup conversations. People think, “If only we could have talked like this the whole time, things would’ve been different.” But you couldn’t have. That level of honesty requires a resoluteness achievable only by being within spitting distance of the exit.
I fell for the projection and forgot the person.
Even if I was only ever borrowing someone else’s certainty, it would become mine eventually.
Too often New Yorkers treated experiences as vaccinations. They went to the Whitney every two years, Coney Island every five, the ballet every twenty.
The older a woman got, the more diligent she had to become about not burdening men with the gory details of her past, lest she scare them off. That was the name of the game: Don’t Scare the Men. Those who encouraged you to indulge in your impulse to share, largely did so to expedite a decision. They knew they were on trial too, but our courtrooms had more lenient judges.
The same event could happen to four different people and one would deem it a coup, another kismet, another ironic, another auspicious. A coup signified chaos, kismet signified fate, irony signified order, auspicious signified faith. Meanwhile, odds were quantifiable but chances were not. Chances were abstract and “for” whereas odds were concrete and “against.
A hero without a damsel is a mere man.
How badly can you be hurt by someone whose handwriting you’ve never seen?
Some of us get smaller denominations from the romance ATM than others. In addition to the flings, I’d had about fifteen five-month relationships, not to mention the six- and nine-month relationships, not to mention the on-and-off ones that came to life in the night like haunted toaster ovens: You up?
Had Cupid’s bastard cherubs snuck into my bedroom and whispered in my ear, “My child, never commit.” I’d begun to suspect that my search an inciting incident was the inciting incident. But before I could get to the bottom of it, I met Boots, who made it all stop, who could not unbreak me by who could protect me from the narrative of the broken.
I don’t think I meant a word of it. But this is how you speak when you’re in a bathroom stall in your twenties, high on cocaine, and testing the depths of your friendships.
This is New York,′ I explained. ‘Everything is outside everyone’s comfort zone.