So Long, See You Tomorrow

by William Maxwell

At night we undressed and got into bed and fell asleep without taking advantage of the dark to unburden our hearts to each other. It strikes me as strange now. It didn’t then.

Between the way things used to be and the way they were now was a void that couldn’t be crossed. I had to find an explanation other than the real one, which was that we were no more immune to misfortune than anybody else, and the idea that kept recurring to me, perhaps because of that pacing the floor with my father, was that I had inadvertently walked through a door that I shouldn’t have gone through and couldn’t get back to the place I hadn’t meant to leave.

When I was a child I told my mother everything. After she died I learned that it was better to keep some things to myself.

but for some reason love, even of the most ardent and soul-destroying kind, is never caught by the lens of the camera. One would almost think it didn’t exist.

It was out of their hands now. They had stopped shouting at each other and put their faith in legal counsel. With the result that how things could be made to look was what counted, not how they actually were.

He knew what had been done to him but not what he had done to deserve it.

Take all this away and what have you done to him? In the face of a deprivation so great, what is the use of asking him to go on being the boy he was. He might as well start life over again as some other boy instead.

Try to understand that other people are real and have feelings too. And some things, once they are done, can’t be undone.”