The house, the pond, the tree-it was all both overwhelmingly familiar and different from what she remembered-smaller and shabbier, somehow. It was like waking up to find that your reflection in the mirror had aged overnight, or had sprouted a new mole: You were forced to admit that things changed, whether you gave them permission to or not.

I can admit, now, that I must have loved Lena. Not in an Unnatural way, but my feelings for her must have been a kind of sickness. How can someone have the power to shatter you to dust--and also to make you feel so whole?

anything, anything is possible, if you can just see the sky.

But maybe happiness isn't in the choosing. Maybe it's in the fiction, in the pretending: that wherever we have ended up is where we intended to be all along.

Mice? Fine. Flying mice? Not so fine.

For a second, I feel a sense of overwhelming grief: for how things change, for the fact that we can never go back. I'm not certain of anything anymore. I don't know what will happen--

Everything in me feels fluttering and free, like I could take off from the ground at any second. Music, I think, he makes me feel like music.