- He was a liar. A good one, at that. And even though I suspected the truth, I thought that if he never said it, if he never admitted it to my face, then I wasn't accountable for the fact that it was true.
- It's very easy to rationalize what you're doing when you don't know the faces and the names of the people you might hurt. It's very easy to choose yourself over someone else when it's an abstract.
-
- "Something I've been wanting to ask you for a while," he says.
- "OK," I say.
- "Why did we break up?"
- I look at him and feel my head cock to the side ever so slightly. I'm genuinely surprised by the question. I laugh gently. "Well," I say, "I think that's what eighteen-year-olds do. They break up."
- It is the teenage feelings that are the most intoxicating, the ones that have the power to render you helpless.
- "From experience, I can tell you that if you go around trying to figure out what's fair in life or whether you deserve something or not, that's a rabbit hole that is hard to climb out of.
- It's sort of absurd, isn't it? How we grab on to facts and consequences looking to blame or exonerate ourselves?
- "You think too much," he says. "That's your problem. You're trying too hard to find the perfect answer when an answer will do."
- "I think I've been jumping from place to place thinking that I'm supposed to find the perfect life for myself, that it's out there somewhere and I have to find it. And it has to be just so. You know?"
- Life is just a series of breaths in and out.
- I know letting him know how badly I want to see him again will only serve to push him further away. I know that, but sometimes you can't help but show the things you feel. Sometimes, despite how hard you try to fight your feelings, they show up in the glassiness of your eyes, the downward turn of your lips, the shakiness of your voice, and the lump in your throat.
- Hearts are just like legs, I guess. They mend.
- "I have to think that there is a method to all of this madness," I tell Ethan.
- But I wonder how different my world would be if any of those things had happened. You can't change just one part, can you? When you sit there and wish things had happened differently, you can't just wish away the bad stuff. You have to think about all the good stuff you might lose, too. Better just to stay in the now and focus on what you can do better in the future.
-
- "But I always had this feeling that maybe there was someone better out there."
- "Really?"
- "Yeah," she says. "I mean, we've been together since we were in college, and then we both went on to more school, and who has time to really focus on dating then? Right? So I stayed with him because...I didn't really see a reason not to. We were comfortable around each other. We were happy enough. And then, you know, I got the age where I felt I should get married. And things have been fine between us. Always fine."
- "But just fine?"
- "Right," she says.
- "I mean, I don't know," she says. "I just sometimes hoped that I could have something more than just fine. Someone who made me feel like I hung the moon. But I sort of stopped believing that existed, I think. And I figured, why not marry a guy like Mark? He's a nice guy."
-
- "Do you think that sometimes you can just tell about a person?"
- "Like you meet them and you think, this one isn't like the rest of them, this one is something?"
- I don't believe that being in love absolves you of anything. I no longer believe that all's fair in love and war. I'd go so far as to say your actions in love are not an exception to who you are. They are, in fact, the very definition of who you are.
-
- It doesn’t matter if we don’t mean to do the things we do. It doesn’t matter if it was an accident or a mistake. It doesn’t even matter if we think this is all up to fate. Because regardless of our destiny, we still have to answer for our actions. We make choices, big and small, every day of our lives, and those choices have consequences.
- We have to face those consequences head-on, for better or worse. We don’t get to erase them just by saying we didn’t mean to. Fate or not, our lives are still the results of our choices. I’m starting to think that when we don’t own them, we don’t own ourselves.
- You have to talk about it, even when you aren’t talking about it. And maybe that’s OK. Maybe what’s important is that you have someone to listen.
- “So I’m not going to go around worrying too much,” I tell her. “I’m just going to do my best and live under the assumption that if there are things in this life that we are supposed to do, if there are people in this world we are supposed to love, we’ll find them. In time. The future is so incredibly unpredictable that trying to plan for it is like studying for a test you’ll never take. I’m OK in this moment. To be with you. Here. In Los Angeles. If we’re both quiet, we can hear birds chirping outside. If we take a moment, we can smell the onions from the Mexican place on the corner. This moment, we’re OK. So I’m just going to focus on what I want and need right now and trust that the future will take care of itself.”
- “I’m not sure I believe in that anymore, either,” he says. “Timing seems like an excuse. Extenuating circumstances is an excuse. If you love someone, if you think you could make them happy for the rest of your life together, then nothing should stop you. You should be prepared to take them as they are and deal with the consequences. Relationships aren’t neat and clean. They’re ugly and messy, and they make almost no sense except to the two people in them. That’s what I think. I think if you truly love someone, you accept the circumstances; you don’t hide behind them.”
-
- I was reading a book about the cosmos recently,” he says, and then he looks around and goes, “Hold on, trust me, this relates.”
- The crowd laughs again.
- “And I was reading about different theories about the universe. I was really taken with this one theory that states that everything that is possible happens. That means that when you flip a quarter, it doesn’t come down heads or tails. It comes up heads and tails. Every time you flip a coin and it comes up heads, you are merely in the universe where the coin came up heads. There is another version of you out there, created the second the quarter flipped, who saw it come up tails. This is happening every second of every day. The world is splitting further and further into an infinite number of parallel universes where everything that could happen is happening. This is completely plausible, by the way. It’s a legitimate interpretation of quantum mechanics. It’s entirely possible that every time we make a decision, there is a version of us out there somewhere who made a different choice. An infinite number of versions of ourselves are living out the consequences of every single possibility in our lives. What I’m getting at here is that I know there may be universes out there where I made different choices that led me somewhere else, led me to _someone else._”
- He looks at Gabby. “And my heart breaks for every single version of me that didn’t end up with you.”
aug 4 2015 ∞
aug 5 2015 +
aug 5 2015 +