I get it now. I have to make good on my promise. To let her go. To really let her go. To let us both go.

Willem tsk-tsks. "You Americans are so violent. I'm Dutch. The worst I will do is run her over with a bicycle.

In Rome, I really wanted an Audrey Hepburn Roman Holiday experience, but the Trevi Fountain was crowded, there was a McDonald's at the base of the Spanish Steps, and the ruins smelled like cat pee because of all the strays. The same thing happened in Prague, where I'd been yearning for some of the bohemianism of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. But no, there were no fabulous artists, no guys who looked remotely like a young Daniel Day-Lewis. I saw this one mysterious-looking guy reading Sartre in a cafe, but then his cell phone rang and he started talking in aloud Texan twang.

Something special is ending, and you're sad, but you can't be that said because, hey, it was good while it lasted, and there'll be other vacations, other good times.

And yes, it was a high school romance, but it was still the kind of romance where I thought we were trying to find a way to make it forever.

If these walls could talk, I wonder what secrets they'd tell.

Is that what death would feel like? The nicest, warmest, heaviest never-ending nap? If that’s what it’s like, I wouldn’t mind.