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Replace it all. New Everything. Nora doesn’t know that starting over like this is a privilege reserved almost exclusively for the young. She doesn’t know that metaphorical fumigation is often the only option when you’re, say, forty, and you have a job and a mortgage and responsibilities and friends and New Everything is just a lot of work, a lot of money you don’t have. She doesn’t think about it because she doesn’t have to; she simply does what young people do, what young people are uniquely able to do: in the face of her first real broken heart, she gets on an airplane and finds New
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Why doesn’t the thought of not having existed before bother him as much as the thought of not existing after? It’s the same exact thing!
Would you happen to be free at the moment?” “Right now?” “We could schedule another panic attack for next week if that’s better?” “Right. Right right right. Yes, now. I don’t know why I said—I’m not busy.” This
do you like ice cream? There’s a shop around the corner.” “You’re up for it?” “Yeah. I think so.” “Let’s do it.” She’s not sure if it counts as a date for a man to invite you to his panic attack and then tack ice cream onto the end of it, but she tells herself it does.
Their imaginary life feels so mildly unhinged; the stories he invents are never outrageous, just silly. Comforting. Because it’s better than sulking, yes; because it passes the time, yes; but mostly because it feels like someone’s taking care of her—not physically, not like he’s feeding her and buying her clothes, but like he’s taking care of her brain, like he recognizes that part of her isn’t doing so well and he’s doing everything he can to tend to it.
And maybe, ultimately, this is what a real marriage is: adults taking care of each other. Maybe you can be dependent and independent and have someone dependent on you all at the same time with no real problem.
he’d thought the next one would bring a feeling of having it all figured out, but it only tended to bring a feeling of having more to figure out than he had ever realized.
to differentiate reality from imagination by making the imagined things more obvious. It’s weirdly reassuring. “You meet a man in a foreign country. You have never seen him before, and yet you have all these memories with him. You know how he smells before he sits down beside you. You know what he feels like before he touches you. You know what he sounds like before he speaks. It is not déjà vu, Nora. You knew him. How did you know him? Where did you know him from?”
you don’t get to choose what you believe. It’s something you observe in yourself, something you try to understand, something that explains you to yourself and to other people. You believe something or you don’t, or you possibly pretend to believe it well enough to fool yourself for a while.
And like erosion, the effects of all these tiny changes will eventually wear away at the rough edges of the characters’ existence, until, at last, it reveals something perfect. Maybe that’s what happens: everyone gets to live their life over and over until it’s perfect.”
Is it tragic that she’s waited until the bitter end to experience this kind of joy, or beautiful that she found it in time?
Kids don’t realize how hard it is to be the adult, how courage doesn’t just show up, how life is actually more frightening when you’re older because the stakes get higher and higher. You love more and more people and also understand more fully how fragile and temporary they are.
