The Leftovers

by Tom Perrotta

There also weren’t any bad guys to hate, which made everything that much harder to get into focus.

When your words are futile, you’re better off keeping them to yourself, or never even thinking them in the first place.

I should’ve been happy, right?” She laughed softly. “It felt like I wasn’t even there, like it was all happening to someone else, someone I didn’t even know.

“Nothing’s my fault. But I still feel like shit.”

That’s me, he thought with grim satisfaction. The guy who kept his hands to himself.

Meg was going to have to learn for herself what Laurie had figured out over the summer—that it was better to leave well enough alone, to avoid unnecessary encounters with the people you’d left behind, to not keep poking at that sore tooth with the tip of your tongue. Not because you didn’t love them anymore, but because you did, and because that love was useless now, just another dull ache in your phantom limb.