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Because for once, in a moment that was either everything or nothing, there would be someone else in Regan’s universe, and from there everything would be as it was, only very slightly different.
His mind was like a computer with multiple applications open, some of them buzzing with contemplation in the background.
When Regan was younger, she had coveted the prospect of a call or a text; it meant, primarily, attention. It meant that she
had filled the vacancy of someone else’s thoughts. Then, after a while, she began to understand that there was power in devaluing her worth to others.
If others were forced to wait for her time, she thought, then she would not have to owe so much of herself to them.
Your future self will always see what your present self is blind to. This is the problem with mortality, which is in fact a problem of time.
Regan suspected that Marc liked her a little broken; he liked expressing concern for her health, because caring for her made her grateful to him and therefore secured her as one of his treasures.
“I’m not trying to predict you. I’m trying to understand you.”
The thing about women and clothes was, in Regan’s mind, that nothing was ever a permanent expression; it wasn’t any sort of commitment to being this type of girl or that one, but purely today, I am. It was just whichever version of herself she wanted to project for the time being. When attending mass for the first time in at least a year with a sort-of stranger, she’d aimed for somewhere between neutrally well-intentioned and blatantly puritanical.
That I could study you for a lifetime, carrying all of your peculiarities and discretions in the webs of my spidery palms, and still feel empty-handed.
Plus she’d never been to her mother’s taste before, and she certainly wasn’t going to manage it now.
There was nothing worse than being predictable. Nothing smaller than feeling ordinary. Nothing more disappointing than being reminded she was both.
“Oh, almost definitely,” he replied. “I think that, for someone to get close to you, you must have to give them one key at a time. And even then, only one level can be opened at once.”
Narcissistic mother, high-achieving sister, work-obsessed father. So common it’s nearly Freudian.”
“Not bees?” “Not bees,” he said, and handed her the blunt. “Bees are for you.”
He would learn to draw it for her, he thought, or to write it, or graph it. She seemed to appreciate things she could see.
Maybe he’d done it, he thought. Maybe some version of him had gone back in time, changed it, fixed it somehow, unlocked the door that she’d never ended up opening and that had somehow brought her back.
“They have no religion—which makes sense, really, because what is religion except the vague promise of a reward nobody’s ever seen?”
“Okay,” he said, and as she dropped her attention back to her parchment, Aldo contemplated going back to live in that single second of time, when he and she had existed in perfect synchronicity.
Before she knows it, she’s confessing other things: I’m actually not very good at anything in particular. I’m not really very smart. People don’t know it right away, but eventually they sort it out. Sometimes I think: No wait I’m lying, all the time I think: Everyone else is right about me. I am the
He wants to … mentally hold her?
want you to make investments, I want your future.” The last part slipped out. “I want your future, Aldo. I want it for me.”
You make me feel like I’m alive for a fucking reason. Like for once I’m not just a goddamn waste of time.”
She didn’t feel whole with Aldo inside her. Instead, she felt splintered; like she became, in his hands, an infinite number of pieces, an entire infinity herself.
If this is what it is to burn, he thought, then I will be worth more as scattered ash than any of my unscathed pieces.
The problem with sharing the same portion of a city with someone for so long was that no places belonged exclusively to you anymore. You shared them, and then forgot to divvy them up after all was said and done. You knew the things he knew, he knew what you knew, so of course he’s at the same bar, why did she even try.
“So when people say we’re alone in the ether…?” “Alone in everything. In time and space, in existence, in religion.”
Every time you love, pieces of you break off and get replaced by something you steal from someone else.
So true bestie
It seems like it’s the right shape but it’s slightly different every time, so that eventually, very very quietly and over days and days and days, you are transformed into something unrecognizable, and it happens so slowly you don’t even notice, like shedding scales and making new ones.
People thought addiction was a craving, but the difference was this: Cravings were wishes that could be satisfied, but compulsions were needs that must be met.
This is our love, do you see it? This is what it looks like to love you; it looks like an abyss, but it isn’t, do you understand? All falls come with danger, Aldo, but not us. Not us, we float.
