"Maybe I will always have to love the idea of love or a concept of God more than I can love a person."
"Accepting uncertainty was the key to happiness."
"I sometimes wondered why I even answered the phone, but I guess I always had the hope that it would be someone else, some other way of life calling for me."
"The way children stretch time and the way adults forget that stretch could be one of the saddest differences in the world."
"Will I ever stop being surprised by the ways people make hell?"
"These men, these bitches of their boneless limbs – didn’t they know being a woman meant being at war?"
"Past love is as good as a past dream, intangible, impossible to share."
"He excused himself for a nap, and this day blended into his dreams like like years blended into a life, unseen but still felt, the line between memory and present always bleeding."
"All your problems and all the answers to those problems exist in the boundaries of your body."
"I couldn't decide how to feel about what he was saying, whether it was all nonsense or just more evidence that I would never understand this world."
"Sex seemed like a thing that might only happen to me at random, outside my control, like the weather."
"Adults are taught to be anxious about not having enough sex while teenagers are shamed for wanting to have it all the time."
"But what had really happened? It was still unclear. Was it possible nothing of any significance had ever happened between us and our ending was just the sad process of realizing this?"
"It was possible she might not have the right feeling after all, that she wasn't in love, wasn't in limerence, but was in some unnamed place alone."
"She was sure no one had ever been more in love than they were in those weeks, consumed by such longing, wanting to just be alive beside each other."
"The feeling doesn’t always match the loss. Sometimes the bigger ones are easier to take, like ocean waves. Smaller, human losses, the ones that carry a sense of fault, a choice, a wrong turn – they haunt, fuse in you, become impossible to remove."
"It was grotesque and eerie, too strange of a dream."
"I closed my eyes, tried to get as far away from myself as I could."
"He would never be that way again. He would never have the power of that specific kind of not-knowing."
"I needed nothing and was needed nowhere. I almost doubted I was alive."
"And who is to say that loving a person isn’t just loving the idea of that person and not the actual person, all these incomprehensible clots of flesh with all their years gone by and vanished, all their history stored in basements even they cannot reach?"
"Speaking felt impossible, as contained and enclosed as she was, a longing that went on a loop, a longing for nothing at all."
"It depressed me to think that I might have been looking at another person but seeing only myself."
"She missed his nothing. It had felt like something."