Garth Risk Hallberg

Truly unconditional love was suffocating, in that it took so little notice of who you actually were.

And why love things you were destined to lose? Why let yourself feel things if the feelings were doomed to die?

Whatever he's feeling at a given moment is what he's always been and always will be feeling.

Was she Minh Thuy, finally, or was she Jenny? But the time when there had been a meaningful difference between the two would come to seem like a tiny neighborhood where you couldn't decide which house was yours. Which felt important when you were high above, you thought, in the foothills, but not so much at the truer remove of a continent, where the lives you'd lived and the places you'd come from, dwindled to a single point on the horizon, in the incorrigibly distant past.

What he had remembered was to tuck among his changes of clothes one of Regan's framed photographs of the four of them from a few summers back, at Lake Winnipesaukee. He set it up on the nightstand, as if he might swim down into the past, where nothing could go wrong.

When he lifted his head, the sun seemed impossibly close. Science-fictionally close.

You assumed whatever was vivid to yourself was vivid to others, and vice versa, but she was going to make him spell it out, for the first time in either of their lives.