How can you spend hours every day trying in small ways to figure out who you are, then have a near-stranger give you a sentence of yourself that says it better than you ever could?

People take love's continuity for granted, just as they take their body's continuity for granted. They don't realize that the best thing about love is its regular presence. Once you can establish that, it's an added foundation to your life.

New Yorkers love the bigness -- the skyscrapers, the freedom, the lights. But they also love it when they can carve out some smallness for themselves. When the guy at the corner store knows which newspaper you want. When the barista has your order ready before you open your mouth. When you start to recognize the people in your orbit, and you know that, say, if you're waiting for the subway at eight fifteen on the dot, odds are the redhead with the red umbrella is going to be there too.

When first love ends, most people eventually know there will be more to come. They are not through with love. Love is not through with them. It will never be the same as the first, but it will be better in different ways.

It was rather awkward, insofar as we were both teetering between the possibility of something and the possibility of nothing.

I'm not in love with you.

Do I really have to find a word for it? Can't it just be what it is?