It felt like the punchline: to see now, so clearly, the way he had turned the people in his life into characters. He’d picked the narrative, then fit people, in his experience of them, to reinforce it. What if you don’t do that anymore? he thought.

“Most of the time it all feels like it’s happening really far away from me. Like the world is something that’s happening to other people, but not to me. Maybe it’s just that there’s so much clutter already in my brain that I can’t take in anything else. As if all of my anxieties are a barrier between me and all the things I should be worried about.

It’s not about what you remember. It’s about why you remember it that way.

We’re not with her in the present as she’s falling in love, we’re with her as she goes back into her memories, with all the grief and longing and distance that comes with the passage of time.

He had never loved things that much until they were

the best available substitute for love. How did that happen?

“I guess I just always thought that people are the way we are,” he said. “Like, we grow and evolve, to a certain extent, and maybe our behavior changes, but so much of what makes us ourselves is innate, or intractable. But what if the bad stuff is like a parasite? What if it’s something you can actually isolate and remove, like—I don’t know, spirit

For so long all the things that happened to me were just these—these different parts, this jumble of disconnected incidents that didn’t mean anything on their own. And now it feels like all those bones took shape and became a skeleton. Something assembled. It became a whole body.”

Now after cherry-picking the memories that served the narrative he had wanted to tell, the ones he never wrote were lost to time.