you're pretty like you

“It seems to her that [she] is slowly disappearing. Even her presences, at dinners, in class, are not truly presences. The chair where she sits at the dinner table is like the space at the back of the mouth, where a tooth has been removed, where the feeling of possessing a tooth still lingers.”

“You make lists in your head about what you want in a lover, like brown hair and a sweet voice. A sharp mind and a soft heart, a sense of humor that actually makes you laugh like you mean it. This and that. And it’s all bullshit. Because people aren’t lists. And I’ve always wanted to be the person who made someone realize that. I want to come across someone with a list in their head that is nothing like the person I am, and I want to show them what they didn’t even know they were looking for. People who think they know what they want are fooling themselves. Nobody really knows what they want. Not until it’s right in front of them.”