"I want you to spend the night," you said. And it was definitely your phrasing that ensured it. If you had said, "Let's have sex," or "Let's go to my place," or even "I really want you," I'm not sure we would have gone quite as far as we did. But I loved the notion that the night was mine to spend, and I immediately decided to spend it with you.

It doesn't have to be on Valentine's Day. It doesn't have to be by the time you turn eighteen or thirty-three or fifty-nine. It doesn't have to conform to whatever is usual. It doesn't have to be kismet at once, or rhapsody by the third date. It just has to be. In time. In place. In spirit. It just has to be.

And maybe it is only by finding yourself that you can feel the true intensity of becoming close to another person.

We are so used to releasing words, we don't know what to do with them if they stay. No matter how many times we let them go, they come back. The words that matter always stay.

It would be too easy to say that I feel invisible. Instead, I feel painfully visible, and entirely ignored.

this is why we call people exes, I guess - because the paths that cross in the middle end up separating at the end. it's too easy to see an X as a cross-out. it's not, because there's no way to cross out something like that. the X is a diagram of two paths.

I try to be a careful person. Most of the time my carelessness is completely unintentional.