city-on-fire

I didn't drink, I told him, with that embarrassed feeling I got whenever I was reminded that I had a body, that I looked like anything at all.

There was this hot, yellowy stillness the air always got in the minutes before the last bell, as if it were stiffening itself to be shattered.

An actual artist, living right under her nose.

I keep having this fantasy about some wide river or channel I'm on the bank of. I can look up, and on the far side is another, better self, holding hands with Mercer__hat's his name, my ex__nd both of them are watching me flail over here, watching me from the life I'm supposed to have had. When did it become impossible to get there from here? When did that bridge get burned?

When he went to go get groceries, though, he asked Mercer to come. 'There's no one I'd rather get stuck in a snowdrift and freeze to death with,' William said.

And so she remained, like everything that mattered to me then, secret__o be pursued in the woods by moonlight, when I was supposed to be studying.

That it may be the only thing the darkness makes clearer: who really matters is whoever you're most desperate to see.

Charlie tried to focus on what she was saying, but his head felt packed with gauze. Like no one could reach him in here, where it hurt.

So he'll keep dragging himself up this bridge between possible worlds, this rickety ruin of light, trying to imagine it might matter if he makes it to the other side.

The absence of a skyline makes him doubt he'll ever get where he's going, and behind him, where he's come from might as well not be there.

Because if every moment of a life is present in every other, so is every old self you've ever tried to outrun. And then how to know__he present self having always felt flimsy, somehow, compared to the one so acutely alive under the kitchen table__hich you, specifically, is the real one?

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.