The Myth of You and Me

• In spite of myself, I felt the stirrings of a certain familiar excitement—the anticipation of departure. I was not looking forward to the arrival in Boston, and I didn’t know where I would go after that. But I knew how good it would feel to be driving into darkness, singing along with Nebraska, alone in a traveling world. With moving, I have always been partial to the in-between, the blurred highway outside t

• In spite of myself, I felt the stirrings of a certain familiar excitement—the anticipation of departure. I was not looking forward to the arrival in Boston, and I didn’t know where I would go after that. But I knew how good it would feel to be driving into darkness, singing along with Nebraska, alone in a traveling world. With moving, I have always been partial to the in-between, the blurred highway outside the window, that suspended time when everything you were lies behind you like a molted skin, and everything you might become shimmers at the horizon. You might choose anything and make it happen, constrained by nothing but your own imagination, sure that not even gravity can hold you. (77)

• So Sonia was not my only, or even my first, best friend. She was the last. It wasn’t that I hadn’t made friends since, just that I thought myself past the age of that particular kind of friendship. Adult friendship doesn’t grant you an exclusive, isn’t meant to be ranked above romance and family. I couldn’t imagine ever living that moment again, when you say, with a shy and hopeful pride, “You’re my best friend.” The other person says it back and, there, you have chosen each other, out of everyone in the world. You have fallen in love and said so. (114)

• Maybe I did live an old story, but I couldn’t’ help but live it as though for the first time. The first time you fall in love, it’s like you’ve created the first love in the universe, and the first time someone you love dies, you grieve the universe’s first death. What does it help to be told that what you feel is nothing new? You want your father’s respect, not as a pale copy of all the children who have ever wanted their father’s respect, but fiercely, because he’s the only father you’ll ever have. (140)

• I hated him, and myself, for our inability to help or understand—both of us so tall, so capable and controlled, so large with failure. (163)

• We seemed to fit together, in a way that suggested nothing had ever quite fit before. (187)

• She turned and leaned against the counter. “I just mean, you’re so familiar, but then you’re not. I don’t’ know the rules for how we should interact.” She looked down at her mug. “When I saw you, my first feeling was relief, you know, like thank God, Camazon’s here, she’ll understand, I can tell her everything . . . but then I remembered that’s not who we are to each other anymore.” She looked up. “Is it?” (260)

• We’d just been two wanderers clinging to each other, pretending it was possible to stop running, pretending we belonged. … I’d been taking direction from a man who didn’t exist. Maybe I didn’t exist, either, with no one to bear witness to my presence, no one to testify that I had combed Oliver’s hair, felt the warmth of Will’s skin, stripped off my clothes and plunged naked into water, twirled in circles with Sonia in her backyard. I sat there until I began t o feel that if someone didn’t touch me I would slowly disappear. (272)

• I wanted to ask Sonia these questions, but I knew she would only look at me, incredulous, and ask me what difference it made. Her mother needed her, and here she was, no matter what the woman had done. Was that weakness on Sonia’s part, or strength? Her whole life, she’d loved a person who gave and withdrew her affection at every turn. No wonders she thought of me as a coward for fleeing the moment something went wrong. … Here was the secret of this house, the thing it took bravery to face—that to go on loving someone means to over and over allow the necessary pain. Standing there in the doorway, I had a moment of empathy so total that I felt I was Sonia—we were, finally, singular, as we’d once imagined ourselves to be. For the first time since we met I didn’t just witness Sonia’s life, I lived it. I struggled, between my mother’s blind hatred and my father’s blind love, to figure out which one I deserved. I heard my own mother say she wished I had never been born. I watched as my best friend abandoned me. I felt what it was to be negated in that way, and I understood that if hatred can negate us, love can create us, and when we lose it we don’t know who we are. (273-274)