“I knowthe odds are all against meand I knowyou might not feel this way toobut I knowI would rather die tryingto knowif I could mean something to you”

“Dispel, v. It was the way you said, “I have something to tell you.” I could feel the magic drain from the room.”

“Then I told her what I didn’t see. Namely, that I didn’t see her.You could be standing a few feet away—Clara’s dance partner, or across the street taking a picture of Rudolph before he takes �ight. I could havesat next to you on the subway, or brushed beside you as we went through the turnstiles. But whether or not you are here, you are here—becausethese words are for you, and they wouldn’t exist if you weren’t here in some way. This notebook is a strange instrument—the player doesn’t knowthe music until it’s being played.”

“Seeing it erases any premonitions I might have had, because even if I felt something was wrong, I never would have pictured this.”

“I find myself thinking back to something I saw on the local news about a year ago. A teen football player had died in a car accident. The cameras showed all his friends after the funeral—these big hulking guys, all in tears, saying, “I loved him. We all loved him so much.” I started crying, too, and I wondered if these guys had told the football player they loved him while he was alive, or whether it was only with death that this strange word, love, could be used. I vowed then and there that I would never hesitate to speak up to the people I loved. They deserved to know they gave meaning to my life. They deserved to know I thought the world of them.”

“I wanted to ask her, What does a stranger feel like? Not to be snarky or sarcastic. Because I really wanted to know if there was a difference,vif there was a way to become truly knowable, if there wasn’t always something keeping you a stranger, even to the people you weren’t strange to at all.”

“And still, for all the jealously, all the doubt, sometimes I will be struck with a kind of awe that we're together. That someone like me could find someone like you --- it renders me wordless. Because surely words would conspire against such luck, would protest the unlikelihood of such a turn of events.”