What could be more normal than to be out of place everywhere you go? What could be more American?

Everything changes and this one fucking time, you’re in charge of it, my God, so choose! Make the wrong choice, that’s fine! That’s fine! But choose.’”

Realizing we are no longer in love is not the heartbreaking sensation we imagine when we are in love—because it is no sensation at all. It is a realization made by a bystander.

We could invent a time machine, my Walloon, and go back and never choose each other. We could go back further still and try it all over again with what we know; try to be young together and in love, the way hardly anybody gets to be. Young and foolish and happy. But I have an easier solution: Just take the ordinary time machine. And try to grow

then a castaway in the wide ocean of possibility,

That’s all we have. We must celebrate them. Remember that. I don’t care who you love, but if you love someone…if you love someone, you have to love them every day. You have to choose them every day.”

What do we want from the past, anyway? For it to trifle with us no longer? For it to cease its surprises, its stirrings, its stings, for it to be fixed forever—for it to die? But the past is like those jellyfish that, when harmed, coil into themselves and revert to immature blobs from which they begin new lives and become, in simple terms,

I want to talk about love. I have been with my wife, Federico’s great-aunt, for a long time. I want to tell you it isn’t something you celebrate every ten years. Or every five years. It’s every day. You understand me? I believe in a Supreme Being. I don’t know who God is, I don’t know anything about God, but I know Maria is here because of God. The

Strangle him? Salute him? Put him in a novel? You are seeing suffering, Robert used to say when confronted with a horrible person. You are seeing someone in pain.