My best friends taught me a new kind of quiet, the peaceful stillness of knowing one another so well you don’t need to fill the space. And a new kind of loud: noise as a celebration, as the overflow of joy at being alive, here, now.

breathing hard in the cold. “I think I love you, Harriet,” he says. Love, I think. That’s new. And I’ll never be happy without it again.

And for the second time, I tuck myself into their tiny second-floor bathroom with the water running and sob into my knuckles, because I know I can’t take him back to San Francisco. Know I can’t bear to be the person who takes him away from where he belongs.

The point is, some people live the bulk of their lives in their minds (me), and some are highly physical beings (Wyn).

you were naked in the painting,” he clarifies. “I just forgot it might be weird to tell someone they look exactly the same as they do in a painting where they’re not wearing clothes.” “This is going really well,”

The feeling of being so grateful to have something worth missing.

I understood, then, the immense honor it is to hurt like she does. To have loved someone so much that the taste of maple syrup can make you cry and laugh at the same time.

Like we had nowhere to be, nothing to do but be together.”

“Love means constantly saying you’re sorry, and then doing better.”