For the longest time after that, neither of us said anything. I was unaccustomed to his silence, but I didn't mind it. I knew near everything about him, and he knew near everything about me, and all that made our quiet a kind of song. The kind you hum without even knowing what it is or why you're humming it. The kind that you've always known.

What are you reading?" Owen asks. "Charlotte's Web," Liz says. "It's really sad. One of the main characters just died." "You ought to read the book from end to beginning," Owen jokes. "That way, no one dies, and it's always a happy ending.

Intimacy doesn't have all that much to do with backseats of cars. Real intimacy is brushing your teeth together.

Life used to move much more quickly when I was a girl. We needed to abbreviate just to keep up.

In you, I found infinity. In you, I was reborn

We aren't the things we collect, acquire, read. We are, for as long as we are here, only love. The things we loved. The people we loved. And these, I think these really do live on.

Liz looks at the tissue box, which is decorated with drawings of snowmen engaged in various holiday activities. One of the snowmen is happily placing a smiling rack of gingerbread men in an oven. Baking gingerbread men, or any cooking for that matter, is probably close to suicide for a snowman, Liz thinks. Why would a snowman voluntarily engage in an activity that would in all likelihood melt him? Can snowmen even eat? Liz glares at the box.