against narrative

you don’t always spend forever with the person you love the most, but you can spend forever trying to reconcile that fact in your mind.

It’s confusing. It’s an absurdity. But hardly the only one: We fall in love. We know we are going to die. We do strange things like make art, and dream, and put each other in prison, and cut ourselves when we’re depressed.

I had my reasons, of course. As I say, she is crazy. I am, too, but in a very different way. The immense effort it took for me to spend a whole day with her and ensure that it was “perfect”—that I did nothing to offend, upset, or bother her—proved to me that we just didn’t work. And I thought: When a relationship does not work, each party has the

That’s called living in hell: refusing to love because you want the endgame to be different than it is. Wanting life to be different from what it is. That’s also called leaving without leaving. Dying before you die. It’s as if there is a part of you that so rails against being shattered by love that you shatter yourself first.