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“I’m already home. I’m with you.” That made me smile. Such a Dante thing to say.
God, let his smile be enough.
“Mom, why didn’t anybody tell me that love hurts so much?”
I realized I didn’t have any hobbies.
“You know, Ari, we’re screwed.” “Yup, we’re screwed.”
“So, if we’re screwed, do you think that sometime, we could, like, screw?”
I wondered what that was like, to be able to kiss someone you liked any time you wanted. In front of everybody. I would never know what that would be like. Not ever.
“These are the names I have so far: Rafael—” “Nice.” “Michelangelo.” “That’s nuts!” “This from a boy named Aristotle.” “Shut up.” “I don’t do ‘shut up.’ ” “Like I hadn’t noticed.”
Loving yourself seems like a really weird goal. But, hell, what do I know?
Why the hell did we talk to dogs as if they understood the stupid things we were saying to them? I lifted her head and kissed her on her dog forehead.
He was a mere mortal like everyone else. Hey, he wasn’t perfect. He didn’t need to be. I sure as hell wasn’t perfect. Not even close. And he loved me. Imperfect, fucked-up me. Nice. Sweet. Wow.
WHEN I WAS A LITTLE boy and I’d walk into a room full of people, I would count them. I would count them and recount them—and I never knew why I did that.
“Cassandra, I’m gay. I’m seventeen years old—and I’m scared.”
I once thought that you could find all the secrets of the universe in someone’s hand. And I think that’s true. I did find all the secrets of the universe in your hand. Your hand, Dante. But I also think that you can find all the secrets of the universe when a girl who is more a woman than she is a girl cries all her hurt into your shoulder. And you can also discover all the hurt that exists in the world in your own tears—if you listen to the song your tears are singing.
And I didn’t give a shit that I was young, and I had just turned seventeen and I didn’t give a shit if anyone thought I was too young to feel the things that I felt. Too young? Tell that to my fucking heart.
Let’s map out the year, Dante. Let’s write our names and chart out some paths. And go see what we have never seen. And be what we have never been.
We are all cartographers—all of us.
We all want to write our names on the map of the world.
“You know, we not only have to be smart enough to be cartographers—we also have to be brave enough to dive into waters that may not be very friendly.”
I had always wanted to meet love, understand it, let it live inside me. I ran into it one summer day when I heard Dante’s voice. Now I wished I’d never run into it. No one had ever told me love didn’t come to stay. Now that it had left me, I was a shell, a hollow body with nothing in it but the echoes of Dante’s voice, distant and unreachable. And my own voice was gone.
