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There’s no proximity alert, no indication that you’re standing on the precipice. And maybe that’s what makes tragedy so tragic.
It’s the beautiful thing about youth. There’s a weightlessness that permeates everything because no damning choices have been made, no paths committed to, and the road forking out ahead is pure, unlimited potential.
we leave this life the same way we enter it—totally alone, bereft.
“It’s like we get so set in our ways, so entrenched in those grooves, we stop seeing our loved ones for who they are.
What if all the pieces of belief and memory that comprise who I am—my profession, Daniela, my son—are nothing but a tragic misfiring in that gray matter between my ears? Will I keep fighting to be the man I think I am? Or will I disown him and everything he loves, and step into the skin of the person this world would like for me to be?
you can’t solve them all at once. There’s always a larger, overarching question—the big target. But if you obsess on the sheer enormity of it, you lose focus.
The key is to start small. Focus on solving problems you can answer. Build some dry ground to stand on. And after you’ve put in the work, and if you’re lucky, the mystery of the overarching question becomes knowable. Like stepping slowly back from a photomontage to witness the ultimate image revealing itself.
suspicion leads to bias, and bias doesn’t lead to truth.
We’re all just wandering through the tundra of our existence, assigning value to worthlessness, when all that we love and hate, all we believe in and fight for and kill for and die for is as meaningless as images projected onto Plexiglas.
Daniela hasn’t worn perfume in years, but she’s wearing it tonight, and she smells like Daniela without me, like Daniela before our separate scents merged into us.
our existence was all about choices
“We all live day to day completely oblivious to the fact that we’re a part of a much larger and stranger reality than we can possibly imagine.”
“It’s terrifying when you consider that every thought we have, every choice we could possibly make, branches into a new world.
The Many-Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics posits that all possible realities exist. That everything which has a probability of happening is happening. Everything that might have occurred in our past did occur, only in another universe.
What if we actually inhabit the multiverse, but our brains have evolved in such a way as to equip us with a firewall that limits what we perceive to a single universe? One worldline. The one we choose, moment to moment.
“He wasn’t a monster. If he did this to you, he would have rationalized it somehow. That’s how decent people justify bad behavior.
I wonder, Is this what God feels? The rush that comes from having literally spoken a world into existence?
“Why do people marry versions of their controlling mothers? Or absent fathers? To have a shot at righting old wrongs. Fixing things as an adult that hurt you as a child.
It’s a troubling paradox—I have total control, but only to the extent I have control over myself.
If you strip away all the trappings of personality and lifestyle, what are the core components that make me me?
What a miracle it is to have people to come home to every day. To be loved. To be expected.
I thought I appreciated every moment, but sitting here in the cold, I know I took it all for granted. And how could I not? Until everything topples, we have no idea what we actually have, how precariously and perfectly it all hangs together.
“You know what the definition of insanity is?” “What?” “Doing the same thing again and again and expecting different results.”
We associate reality with the tangible—everything we can experience with our senses.
We’re all made of the same thing—the blown-out pieces of matter formed in the fires of dead stars. I’ve just never felt that knowledge in my bones until that moment, there, with you. And it’s because of you.
My first instinct is to protect her from the knowledge of what I’m contemplating, but our marriage isn’t built on keeping secrets. We talk about everything. The hardest things. It’s embedded in our identity as a couple.
Thinking that I’d found something I didn’t even know I’d been searching for.
“Every moment, every breath, contains a choice. But life is imperfect. We make the wrong choices. So we end up living in a state of perpetual regret, and is there anything worse? I built something that could actually eradicate regret. Let you find worlds where you made the right choice.”
Daniela says, “Life doesn’t work that way. You live with your choices and learn. You don’t cheat the system.”
As long as my people are with me, I’m ready for anything.