In short, everything about his life was different for him at the bottom of that well.
A man can go along obeying all the rules and then it don't matter a damn anymore.
Mel thought real love was nothing less than spiritual love. He'd said he'd spent five years in a seminary before quitting to go to medical school. He said he still looked back on those years in the seminary as the most important years of his life.
The fiction Im most interested in has lines of reference to the real world.
Dreams, you know, are what you wake up from.
But he stays by the window, remembering that life. They had laughed. They had leaned on each other and laughed until the tears had come, while everything else—the cold and where he'd go in it—was outside, for a while anyway.