Why is it every other person you meet says they're an artist? A real artist doesn't need to gas on about it, he doesn't have time. He does his work and sweats it out in silence, and no one can help him at all.

But love is love. It makes you do terribly stupid things.

But when Bumby nursed, his fist clutching the fabric of my robe, his eyes soft and bottomless and locked on mine, as if I were the very heart of his universe, I couldn't help but melt into him.

To marry was to say you believed in the future and in the past, too-that history and tradition and hope could stay knit together to hold you up.

A week passes but it feels as if he's never been anywhere else. It's one of the things war does to you. Everything you see works to replace moments and people from your life before, until you can't remember why any of it mattered. It doesn't help if you're a soldier. The effect is the same.

Nothing hurts if you don't let it.

But in the end, fighting for a love that was already gone felt like trying to live in the ruins of a lost city.