“I figured Alan wasn’t really Alan anymore, that maybe the meds or the disease had made him someone else, someone more timid, someone I actually felt close to. I kept hoping that this would be it, that this would be as bad as it would ever get.”

“And again. I kept clicking until the photograph was demolished, until it was no more than a mosaic of gray tiles, adding up to nothing.Nothing. Because wasn’t that how I felt that day? If you zoom close—if you really get close to someone, if you really get close to yourself—then youlose the other person, you lose yourself entirely. You get so close you can’t see anything anymore. Your mind becomes all these abstract fragments.English becomes math.”

“Am I doing the right thing? Is it ever right to hurt someone? But is it right to stay with someone when you want to be with someone else? Which one would hurt more?”

“I knew that, in my whole life, if I married Aspen or someone else, no one would ever make me feel this way. It wasn’t like I made his world better. It was like I was his world. It wasn’t some explosion; it wasn’t fireworks. It was a fire, burning slowly from the inside out.”

“I would not wish to marry someone who had already been married. It would be,' she opined, 'like having someone else break in one's own pony.”

“I was the only creature with a vagina who would duck if someone ever tried to hand me a baby. I was too selfish to be responsible for someone else's life.”