it was really dedicated to him, as a token of something very beautiful in me that would take no genius to figure out and that urged me to throw in an extended cadenza. Just for him.

In a month or so from now, when I’d revisit Rome, being here tonight with Oliver would seem totally unreal, as though it had happened to an entirely different me.

our hearts and our bodies are given to us only once. Most of us can’t help but live as though we’ve got two lives to live, one is the mockup, the other the finished version, and then there are all those versions in between. But there’s only one, and before you know it, your heart is worn out, and, as for your body, there comes a point when no one

by not planning to keep things alive, we were avoiding the prospect that they might ever die.

One day he asks her point-blank: “Is it better to speak or die?”

from us to them, back to us and over to them again in this perpetual circuit where the chambers of the heart, like the trapdoors of desire, and the wormholes of time, and the false-bottomed drawer we call identity share a beguiling logic according to which the shortest distance between real life and the life unlived, between who we are and what we

time to time never crossed my mind either.

But it was the gold necklace and the Star of David with a golden mezuzah on his neck that told me here was something more compelling than anything I wanted from him, for it bound us and reminded me that, while everything else conspired to make us the two most dissimilar beings, this at least transcended all differences.

thinking? How could he perceive so many devious turns in others unless he had practiced them himself?