For years I’d been an expert at longing, an expert at loving from the state of not-quite-having, an expert at daydreaming and sinking back into the plush furniture of cinematic imagining. But from those early years with Charles I learned that marriage was something else. It was composed of the pleasures of dwelling, which were harder and thicker than the pleasures of conjuring. Marriage wasn’t the bliss of possibility. It was the more complicated satisfaction of actually living and actually having.
