Nicholl McIntyre

“she and Mark had a standing dinner date every other Wednesday, a whole stupid rigamarole where she put on lipstick and didn’t let herself wear a nursing bra and they went to Randolph Street or Lincoln Park or occasionally some exalted hole-in-the-wall in a distant and ominous suburb, and during the drive they talked about all the regular boring things that regular boring parents talked about while dating under duress, though they’d both rather have been sleeping or masturbating or watching The Sopranos on separate televisions:”
― Claire Lombardo, Same As It Ever Was

“just loneliness, loneliness at their respective outsets that colored everything else; or proximity, or passion; or hurting each other, or watching both their children leave the nest, or deciding to keep coming home to each other at the end of the day. Closeness and distance at the same time, antipathy and affinity, love and exhaustion. The way time moves, glacial and breakneck, the way two people fit together in a bed, in the hours after their son is born and the hours before his wedding.”
― Claire Lombardo, Same As It Ever Was

“but the strangest thing I remember about having young children is how interminably the time moves, just these days upon days upon days, and every single one of them feels a million years long, but then suddenly months have gone by, enough time for a new baby to be born or one of the kids to start kindergarten, or college for God’s sake, and it— The amount of time I’ve lost contemplating that passage of time is—well, really kind of astounding.”
― Claire Lombardo, Same As It Ever Was

“I’m desperately unhappy. Congenitally ungrateful. Awash in constant panic, perpetually worried that maybe it’s always going to be this way.”
― Claire Lombardo, Same As It Ever Was