I'm really into the rights of immigrants, the rights of the working poor. I'm one of those little activist types. I probably would have just gone to law school. And the scary part is that I was one of those kids who always tested really well. You put a test in front of me, and I would have been like do-do-do-do-do. I probably would have been some community lawyer somewhere - if anything, that's probably what I would have been doing.

Love is the great test of the human. The human is tested by our ability to withstand love. Love is so difficult, it is so challenging, it demands of us that we wreck it with ourselves. It demands of us an honesty that few of us could sustain.

We know story collections end when they end, as well - the pages serving as a countdown - but nevertheless the standard story anthology hews closer to what makes being human so hard: it reminds you with each story how quickly everything we are, everything we call our lives can change, can be upended, can disappear. Never to return.

I sat down next to her. Took her hand. This can work, I said. All we have to do is try.

If you didn't grow up like I did then you don't know, and if you don't know it's probably better you don't judge.

You try every trick in the book to keep her. You write her letters. You quote Neruda. You cancel your Facebook. You give her the passwords to all your e-mail accounts. Because you know in your lying cheater’s heart that sometimes a start is all we ever get.

Ybon was the one who suggested calling the wait something else. Yeah, like what? Maybe, she said, you could call it life.