grinning at the pleasure of having found one another, at the stupid and endlessly affirming joy of being in love.

We’re not with her in the present as she’s falling in love, we’re with her as she goes back into her memories, with all the grief and longing and distance that comes with the passage of time.

It’s not about what you remember. It’s about why you remember it that way.

It felt like the punchline: to see now, so clearly, the way he had turned the people in his life into characters. He’d picked the narrative, then fit people, in his experience of them, to reinforce it. What if you don’t do that anymore? he thought.

You have to keep making the choice to fix yourself. Every time you choose to be nice to yourself instead of being unkind. Every time you decide to experience life fully in all its shades of joy and sorrow. Every time you participate in the boring drudgery of self-care. The whole thing was the healing—everything that came before and everything that’

“It feels like...” Sam trailed off. “I have this loud internal narrator who tells me that I’m a piece of shit, that I don’t deserve anything I have, that any day now the whole thing will come crashing down. It’s delusional, but I can’t stop it. And I have this sense of not being right in my skin. Like I don’t belong in this.” He tugged at his flank

“You know, you think your pain is so monumental, but it’s actually pretty mundane. This is just normal stuff, not some great human theater. It’s what people go through.

This was the thing that he knew now, that he had never quite understood before: the way memory could be both the lock and the key, how easily it kept him in the bondage of old stories he didn’t need anymore, and how easily, too, it could show him everything he needed to know about who he was.

He had never loved things that much until they were