An Abundance of Katherines

by John Green

fugging

I feel like, like, how you matter is defined by the things that matter to you.

“I don’t think you can ever fill the empty space with the thing you lost.

“It’s funny, what people will do to be remembered.” “Well, or to be forgotten, because someday no one will know who’s really buried there.

and I like that. I like knowing one story and having everyone else know another. That’s why those tapes we made are going to be so great one day, because they’ll tell stories that time has swallowed up

you see connections everywhere—so

you’re a natural born storyteller,

I choose to remember that she dumped me one morning on the archery course after this math prodigy named Jerome ran in front of her bow and fell to the ground, claiming he’d been shot by Cupid’s arrow.

she dumped me for a piano prodigy named Robert Vaughan who ended up playing a solo concert at Carnegie Hall when he was eleven, so I guess she made the right call there.

and later that day she dumped me because boys were gross.

and although between us we could have made an unstoppable force of intelligence and upper-body strength and coffee mug-making, she dumped me anyway.

since her name, Katherine Barker, anagrams into Heart Breaker, Ink, like she’s a veritable CEOof Dumping,

that I was both ‘too smart and too dumb’ for her,

where we’d watch the waves crashing against the rocks on the shoreline, and she said there was only one metaphor, and that the metaphor was water beating against rocks—because, she said, both the water and the rocks ended up worse off in the bargain,

none of them ever lit my heart—God,

on fire like she did, but I just needed her so much and it never felt like enough

now I find myself deciding to remember her as a good person with whom I had some good times

“And the moral of the story is that you don’t remember what happened. What you remember becomes what happened. And the second moral of the story, if a story can have multiple morals, is that Dumpers are not inherently worse than Dumpees—breaking up isn’t something that gets done to you; it’s something that happens with you.”

and enough hearing stories from current and former associates of Gutshot Textiles, anyone—anyone—can learn to tell a damned good story.”

“Something about telling that story made my gut grow back together.”

“That’s who you really like. The people you can think out loud in front of.” “The people who’ve been in your secret hiding places.”

he couldn’t help but feel that he would never be a genius.

“Sometimes the kafir likes to say massively obvious things in a really profound voice.”

there’s no level of fame or genius that allows you to transcend oblivion.

The stories they’d told each other were so much a part of the how and why of his liking her. Okay. Loving. Four days in, and already, indisputably: loving.

And so we all matter—maybe less than a lot, but always more than none.

And it wasn’t only the remembered stories that mattered.

there’s a place in the brain for knowing what cannot be remembered.

Nothing was happening, really, but the moment was thick with mattering.

“Yeah. God. We could, couldn’t we? We could just keep going.” Colin’s skin was alive with the feeling of connection to everyone in that car and everyone not in it. And he was feeling not-unique in the very best possible way.

The footnotes of the novel you just read (unless you haven’t finished reading it and are skipping ahead, in which case you should go back and read everything in order and not try to find out what happens, you sneaky little sneakster)

(All in all, a fairly typical Colin-Katherine affair.)

Interestingly, though, throughout my whole career as a pathological Dumper, the Katherines were the only two women who ever dumped me.

Strange. It almost makes me wonder if there’s a formula out there somewhere . .

particularly Margaret “Double Letters” Woollatt.

The wonderful thing about writing stories is that you get to pretend to be people you could never actually be.