Intermezzo

by Sally Rooney

Peter is speaking to him as an equal, someone who understands the complexities of life and intimate relationships: which, he thinks, is exactly what he is, someone who has come to understand those complexities for himself.

But I think, as sad as it is to say, I think people aren’t always very nice to the people they love.

What does it mean to love someone, then? I’m curious. If you don’t care about the person’s feelings, and you’re not nice to them, and you don’t really want them to be happy, how is that love, in your opinion?

All the unhappiness that life has visited on them both: dissolved however briefly in that feeling, shared image of that quiet contentment.

Yes I would like he thinks to live in such a way that I could vanish into thin air at any time without affecting anyone and in fact I feel that for me this would constitute the perfect and perhaps the only acceptable life. At the same time I want desperately to be loved.

She has hated him all along for leaving her, he knows that, and he has hated her for telling him to go.