“Have you ever felt really close to someone? So close that you can't understand why you and the other person have two separate bodies, two separate skins?”

“If you zoom close-if you get really close to someone, if you really get close to yourself-then you lose the other person, you lose yourself entirely. You get so close you can't see anything anymore.”

“They were so close to each other that they preferred death to separation.”

“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.”

“We had lain together, skin on skin, been as close as two people could, and he was a stranger. He was that someone who you are afraid of as a child, stranger. They never told you that stranger might be someone you knew.”

“Desiring another person is perhaps the most risky endeavor of all. As soon as you want somebody—really want him—it is as though you have taken a surgical needle and sutured your happiness to the skin of that person, so that any separation will now cause a lacerating injury.”