“Zeke and I struggled to get to the dressing room so we could get changed. But we were mobbed by people who wanted to congratulate us and tell us how talented and terrific we were.”

“Were we all like that? Were we all trying to change how we looked on the outside to match how we felt on the inside? Were we all trying to change how people saw us?”

“It’s okay to struggle to find our place in this world and the person who will take us for who and what we are. Sometimes we dress ourselves in layers that only get peeled away in the end, to leave us as we should be.”

“Love made us partners in narcissism, and we talked ceaselessly about how close we were, how perfect our connection was, like we were the first people in history to ever get it exactly right.”

“We were taking out mortgages we couldn’t afford because they were camouflaged to look as if we had a reasonable chance of paying them back. Banks then changed the bankruptcy laws so that we could not get out of our obligations once the rates changed. Lastly, they sold us back our own mortgages, shifting back to us any of the risk through our money-market accounts and pension funds.”

“How much to learn if we could spend one hour, spend twenty minutes, with the us we will become! How much could we say to the us we were.”