The History of Love

by Nicole Krauss

When people asked him his name, he made something up. He went through fifteen or twenty names. For a month he referred to himself in the third person as Mr. Fruit. On his sixth birthday he took a running leap out of a second-floor window and tried to fly. He broke his arm and got a permanent scar on his forehead, but from then on nobody ever called him anything but Bird.

Universal Edibility Test. It’s a good idea to know, since some poisonous plants, like hemlock, can look similar to some edible plants, like wild carrots and parsnips. To do the test, you have to first not eat for eight hours. Then you separate the plant into its different parts—root, leaf, stem, bud, and flower—and test a small piece of one on the inside of your wrist. If nothing happens, touch it to the inside of your lip for three minutes, and if nothing happens after that, hold it on your tongue for fifteen minutes. If nothing still happens, you can chew it without swallowing, and hold that in your mouth for fifteen minutes, and if nothing happens after that, swallow and wait eight hours, and if nothing happens after that, eat a quarter of a cup’s worth, and if nothing happens after that: it’s edible.

Holding hands, for example, is a way to remember how it feels to say nothing together.

said I was going to have to turn it down since I was already scheduled to sit on my thumb and rotate in accordance with the movements of the earth around the sun.

Tatiana.

!!!

To lose you have to have had.

LONELY PEOPLE ARE ALWAYS UP IN THE MIDDLE OF THE NIGHT

there are two types of people in the world: those who prefer to be sad among others, and those who prefer to be sad alone.

first time she leaned in to kiss that stranger, how she must have felt herself falling for him, or perhaps simply away from her loneliness, and it’s like some tiny nothing that sets off a natural disaster halfway across the world, only