Aristotle and Dante Dive into the Waters of the World (Aristotle and Dante, #2)

by Benjamin Alire Sáenz

You’re the rain and you’re the desert and you’re the eraser that’s making the word “loneliness” disappear.

My love for him is silent. There are a thousand things living in that silence.”

“Do you know what a cartographer is?” “Of course I do. Dante taught me that word. It’s someone who creates maps. I mean, they don’t create what’s there, they just map it out and, well, show people what’s there.” “That’s it, then,” she said. “You and Dante are going to map out a new world.” “And we’re going to get a lot of things wrong and we’re going to have to keep it all a secret, aren’t we?”

“Mom, why didn’t anybody tell me that love hurts so much?” “If I had told you, would it have changed anything?”

I realized I didn’t have any hobbies. My hobby was thinking about Dante. My hobby was feeling my whole body tremble when I thought of him.

“Well, we are Americans. I mean, you don’t look like a Mexican at all.” “And you do. But that doesn’t make you more Mexican either. We both have giveaway last names, names that mean some people will never consider us real Americans.”

“We’ll never be Mexican enough. We’ll never be American enough. And we’ll never be straight enough.” “Yup,” I said, “and you can bet your ass that, somewhere down the road, we won’t be gay enough.”

“Oh, Ari, let your sisters love you. Let yourself be loved. For all you know, there’s a long line of people wanting you to let them in.”

“Ari, we’ve always loved you—even when you didn’t want us to.” There was a lot of tenderness in Vera’s voice. “You can’t tell other people who to love.”

“Just because you don’t think that you’re anything special doesn’t mean I agree with you.”

If we’re lucky. If we’re very lucky, the universe will send us the people we need to survive.

“My dad told me that during the Vietnam War, there was a body count. He said that the country was counting bodies when they should have been studying the faces of the young men who had been killed. I was thinking that the same thing is happening with the AIDS epidemic.”

And I guess I just wanted to thank you for adding that extra happy to my happy.” “Well, I had an extra happy lying around, so I decided to give it to you.”

But, for me, to love was one thing. To let yourself be loved, well, that was the most difficult thing of all.

The real question is, what kind of person do you want to be? Do you want to love? Or do you want to continue the hate? Hate is a decision. Hate is an emotional pandemic we have never found a cure for. Choose to love.

‘AIDS took away my lover. France knows him as a number. I knew him as the man who was the center of my world.’ ”