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“Don’t tell anyone,” she pleaded, and I decided to pretend she said thank you.
People are at their worst in transition, moving from one life to another.
It was easy to think that Daisy was many things.
You weren’t meant to look at people the way that Lieutenant Gatsby looked at Daisy Fay. You couldn’t peel your skin back and show them how your heart had gone up in flames, how nothing that had come before mattered and nothing that came afterward mattered as long as you had what you wanted.
I knew that there was something empty in him before, but now I could see that it wasn’t empty all the time. Now there was a monstrous want there, remorseless and relentless, and it made my stomach turn that it thought itself love.
When I looked at famous Jay Gatsby, soul gone and some terrible engine he called love driving him now, I could see that for him, the world was always ending. For him, it was all a wreck and a ruin, and he had no idea why the rest of us weren’t screaming.
Maybe that wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe if she breaks enough, something true will come out.
“He looked at her,” I told Nick, “like every girl longs to be looked at.”
“When you can’t fix a thing, the best course of action can be to ruin it all so that no can see what truly happened.”
Nick laughed, and I wondered if that was what love was, making someone forget the pain that gnawed at them and would not stop.
I was a strange combination of bereft and relieved when he was gone. Even after all our time together, I hadn’t quite resigned myself to being a couple yet, half of an equation when the male half could somehow continue as a whole without me.
“Being lonely is not the same as missing me,”
I could almost hear the chorus, his only sin was loving her too much, and at the same time, I could hear the rejoinder in my own voice: his sin was in only loving her and nothing else.
