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

“We always loved to say 'If I'd had a Monday-morning class, I never would have met you'. Or 'If you'd been reading something else, none of this would have happened'. We didn't believe in fate, but we believed in serendipity. We felt very lucky.”

“This isn't even something I've feared, because I never knew it was a possibility.”

“paleontology, n.You couldn’t believe the longest relationship I’d ever been in had only lasted for five months.“Ever?” you asked, as if I might have overlooked a marriage.I couldn’t say, “I never found anyone who interested me all that much,” because it was only our second date, and the jury was still hearing your case.I sat there as you excavated your boyfriends, laid the bones out on the table for me to see. I shifted them around, tried to reassemble them, if only to see if they bore any resemblance to me.”

“It is still strange to see the skyline. I have never seen an absence that's so physical. It's possible I will see the absence for the rest of my life, even when there is something else there. Which is ok. The thing to remember when looking at an absence is that you are standing outside of it.”

“Even now, you refused to be pixelated, forgotten, silenced, erased. Not that I wanted to erase you. The opposite. I wanted the opposite.”

“arrears, n.My faithfulness was as unthinking as your lapse. Of all the things I though would go wrong, I never thought it would be that."It was a mistake," you said. But the cruel thing was, it felt like the mistake was mine, for trusting you.”