“Moments into minutes. Minutes into hours. Hours into days. Days into years. Years into possibility. This will linger.”

“The most understandable thing in the world should be how minutes lead to hours, how hours lead to days, how days can make a year. And yet, this neat progression can still be surprising.”

“awhile, adv.I love the vagueness of words that involve time. 'It took him awhile to come back' -- it could be a matter of minutes or hours, days or years. It is easy for me to say it took me awhile to know. That is about as accurate as I can get. There were sneak previews of knowing, for sure. Instance that made me feel, oh, this could be right, But the moment I shifted from a hope that needed to be proven to a certainty that would be continually challenged? There's no pinpointing that. Perhaps it never happened. Perhaps it happened while I was asleep. Most likely, there's no signal event. There's just the steady accumulation of 'awhile'.”

“I wanted every word to last for hours, every gaze to last for days.”

“Years into days.Days into hours.Hours into minutes.Minutes into moments.Moments into possibility.”

“How can you spend hours every day trying in small ways to figure out who you are, then have a near-stranger give you a sentence of yourself that says it better than you ever could?”

“I haven’t been a good guest in Hugo’s life. I access his memories and discover that he and Austin first became boyfriends at this very celebration, a year ago this weekend. They’d been friends for a little while, but they’d never talked about how they felt. They were each afraid of ruining the friendship, and instead of making it better, their caution made everything awkward. So finally, as a pair of twentysomething men passed by holding hands, Austin said, “Hey, that could be us in ten years.”And Hugo said, “Or ten months.”And Austin said, “Or ten days.”And Hugo said, “Or ten minutes.”And Austin said, “Or ten seconds.”Then they each counted to ten, and held hands for the rest of the day.The start of it.Hugo would have remembered this.But I didn’t.”