I was furious with myself for literally birthing into existence a love so strong it could wreck my life.

We’d not been given perfection, not godliness, not symmetry, nor gracious measurement, not a bad hand, nor a curse; we’d not been given anything other than a life to spend together; our lives, not easy or free from pain; we’d been given only a real life, dreadfully normal and sublime, and I would no longer betray its beauty by wishing it otherwise.

I’m there to see it, and I do feel something like religious ecstasy, but not because I long to understand God, but because I long to better know what it means to be human.

what good was his understanding or the feeling of being understood if it made everyday life harder?

She hugged me like I was the depository for the town’s bad luck and because I’d taken it, the town was free, her daughter was free. Some people believed that all the bad luck in the world was searching for a home and because it had chosen me, it would leave them alone. These people gave me their version of gratitude. I helped them see how free

Underneath fear and his instinct to escape, my father experienced, he told me, a rush of love for my mother that made him feel ill, lost to the depths of a new knowledge: that love and fear got all tangled up,

How horrible, but also how real, how bright, that touch would have been. There was a power in being the object that pulls out people’s worst selves. There’s pleasure in moving away from the hopeful unknown and into cruelty’s indifferent absolute.

I meet reality by trying to either transcend it or sit below its surface. I want the fix, but not the work. I want the world, but not its facts. I do not know how to reconcile opposing desires, to hold them in my mind at the same time. The attempt brings only weakness and I feel myself succumbing to the dismissal of the dissonant mind.

We were petulant and impatient, claiming to experience outsized agony, when expected to endure less romantic realities.