Eight White Nights

What did she mean by love in the trenches? Life with someone? Life without love? Life trying to invent someone and finding the wrong one each time? Life with too many? Life with very few, or none that mattered?

tiny birds puff themselves up to three times their size, the better to conceal their fear of not getting things simply by asking for them

people go together to the movies to see movies or to be together, or because they liked each other and this is what one did sometimes when one liked someone — one went to the movies with her, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. Did one switch from watching the movie to being together, and at what point did one stop switching from one to the other? Why was I even asking all this?

our life finally transposed in the right key, retold in the right tense, in a language that speaks to us and is right for us and us alone, our life finally made real and luminous because it’s revealed, not in ours, but in someone else’s voice, grasped from another’s hand, caught on the face of someone who couldn’t possibly be a stranger

happiness is the one thing in our lives others cannot bring

“Don’t most people look lost at parties?”

It did not occur to me that people who bolt into your life could as easily bolt out of it when they’re done,

she wasn’t about to let happen

as though we’d met before, or had crossed each other’s path but kept missing each other and were being reintroduced at all costs now

Take my name and whisper it to yourself, and in a week’s time come back to it and see if crystals haven’t sprouted around it.