i knew you

a think piece on chloe or sam or sophia or marcus,

"And I realized I had this tendency. To set up tests. Like, How long can I be in the room before he looks up from his phone? Or, If I don’t say anything, will he ever do the laundry? Or, If ​I never suggest we get together with friends or do anything fun, will he be the one to make plans, or does it all fall on me?"

"Sam seems okay. She’s got this new fancy job and I am proud of her. It is easy to be unambivalently happy for her since I’ve got my own decent job. We are these days financial equals, and although I reject the thought, there is a hum in the back of my head. Now, we could have afforded a nicer flat."

"Only six weeks left in London so anticipating him before I experience him seems somehow time efficient, as if enjoying him in absentia before even being on the clock yet."

"After a while, I said ‘I want to write great love poems.’ But what I meant was, I want to be loved. I still do. I want to feel someone’s eyes on me as I sing Joni songs while driving the car, and for them to think to themselves, without saying it, I love her, I’m going to kiss her."

"But I’ve been left waving at someone who pretends not to see me, as though they’ve begun a game and forgotten to tell me the rules. Then I wind up feeling crazy crazy."

"...so naive to assume they would spend the rest of their lives together. They lived in the future in those days, endlessly planning it—and never speaking of the past, and of the unhappy years leading up to their meeting. In many ways, Mariana’s and Sebastian’s lives began when they found each other—in that instant they first saw each other by the river. Mariana believed their love would go on forever. That it would never end—"

"I felt pleasantly disconnected from everything around me, as though observing life underwater, which allowed me to take my time before responding to stressors and to fret less about the things that were ultimately insignificant. I was sure this was the way forward and happy to have finally gotten here, even if I had to undergo a traumatic event to do so. Everyone listened carefully, nodding like a group of NPR hosts. Lauren dipped an endive in yogurt, wiped the side of her mouth, and said politely curiously, “Isn’t that, like, exactly how people describe depression?”"

"I felt pleasantly disconnected from everything around me, as though observing life underwater, which allowed me to take my time before responding to stressors and to fret less about the things that were ultimately insignificant. I was sure this was the way forward and happy to have finally gotten here, even if I had to undergo a traumatic event to do so. Everyone listened carefully, nodding like a group of NPR hosts. Lauren dipped an endive in yogurt, wiped the side of her mouth, and said politely curiously, “Isn’t that, like, exactly how people describe depression?”"

"Now that she was in the secret, now that she knew something that so much concerned her, and the eclipse of which had made life resemble an attempt to play whist with an imperfect pack of cards, the truth of things, their mutual relations, their meaning, and for the most part their horror, rose before her with a kind of architectural vastness."

"What were the regrets that came later? Was it that she had thought he loved her, and then it turned out he didn’t? It couldn’t be that, again—could it? Was that what everything was about?"

"I thought about turning back. Was that one of the things that could be done? Well, of course it was. Here I was in this world, with the same rights as anyone else—I could turn, walk in circles, stamp my foot. But none of these things would change the fact that he was going clear around the Earth, with no plan and no reason to come back to where I was."

"Jethro liked talking about the home he would buy with Lola, but he didn’t want to turn up to the viewing. They were like teenage boys in their rooms, coming up ​with lyrics to write in their notebooks. They weren’t ready to be adults, to make any choices, let alone promises. They didn’t have to think about plans or practicalities, and they could be heroes. They could be gods.

“Do you know what Saint Peter says to everyone who tries to get into heaven?” When I looked blankly, the man who once was president said, “Peter says, ‘Don’t you have any scars?’ And when most would respond proudly, ‘Well no, no I don’t,’ Peter says, ‘Why not? Was there nothing worth fighting for?’”

"He has underlined two stanzas of a Derek Walcott poem very finely, almost tentatively, as though trying not to muss up the page.