That was the summer when everything we would become was hovering just over our heads.

In the months that follow you bend to the work, because it feels like hope, like grace--and because you know in your lying cheater's heart that sometimes a start is all we ever get.

When people are always telling you that you have to have a lot of women, women are very important, there's a chance that you might actually begin to observe them on a more fundamental level. Then you get so much focus that one day you might actually see. Dominican men are told to look at women all the time, but they're definitely not told to see them.

So the kind of boy I was, or that I was told to be, you were kind of this like half-gladiator, half-dude who, you know, was supposed to have as many girls as possible and work until your heart exploded, have no fear, you know.

The thing is - do we really need another writer who writes a book every eighteen months, whether the quality is wonderful or not? I mean, maybe. But I can name twenty off the top of my head who do it. Maybe what we need is a writer like me who goes very slow, as well.

Out of nowhere you said, I love you. For whatever it's worth.

And because love, real love, is not so easily shed.