To Paradise

by Hanya Yanagihara

He had, he was able to see, drifted through that decade, moving through it with the cool detachment of a sleepwalker—to have awakened would have been to be overwhelmed with all he had seen and withstood.

“Because it means that you’ll have someone in your life who really challenges you, who forces you to become better in some way, in whatever way you’re most scared of: Their approval is what’ll hold you accountable.”

“Only people who have a plausible hope of being immortalized in history are so obsessed about how they might get immortalized,”

“I’m scared because I know my last thoughts are going to be about how much time I wasted—how much life I wasted. I’m scared because I’m going to die not being proud of how I lived.”

two men, both of whom had sought succor from another man, one each hoped might save him from the smallness of his life.

In the dark, everyone was helpless, and, knowing that, that I was just like everyone else, no less, made me feel braver.

The problem, though, with trying to be the ideal anything is that eventually the definition changes, and you realize that what you’d been pursuing all along was not a single truth but a set of expectations determined by context. You leave that context, and you leave behind those expectations, too, and then you’re nothing once again.

I had forgotten what being loved felt like: Once, I had understood it, and now I no longer did.

pitying moments, I am able to see the symbolism in this. The baby’s old picture books, a few jackets of Nathaniel’s it’s now far too hot to wear, a pot permanently singed by years of burned meals—and me: all the detritus of Nathaniel’s and David’s lives; all the stuff they didn’t want.

There they’d stand, holding each other’s hands, smelling the air, and looking up at the treetops all around them, their mouths opening in wonder, their lives becoming glorious—for once—even as they ended.

“David,” I say to the water, quietly, so as not to wake the parents who sleep behind me. “Can you hear me?” And then I listen. But no one ever answers.

You ask every night for forgiveness. You know you’ll never receive it.

the truth of who we are, our essential selves, the thing that emerges when everything else has been burned away.