And so I found myself in a kind of love lock: pining for the wrong person, grieving beside a woman whose body I can't touch, being given a second chance I can't find the clarity to take.

Paris at night is a street show of a hundred moments you might have lived.

Forward is forward.

Love equals loss, loss equals you feeling incomplete for life.

All these openings for closeness--all these humans with their disappointments and their desperate hearts, but it's so much easier, so convenient, to blame emotional distance on a lack of time.

The almost biological certainty that the more often you checked your cell phone, the more likely you were to find that one wondrous message or notification that would improve your entire life.

They were too near to me. I loved them to much. And the love overtaking me and combined with the fact that I was going to spend another evening alone, doing nothing with it, being waited down to motionlessness by my own actions made me want to get it over with and fucking be alone.

There is something incredible about the phrase "I'm sorry." When it's used carelessly, the expression is impotent, and can even offend. But when you really, really mean it--even if your mother is night-gowned and bed-ready with a scrum of toothpaste still in her mouth, when the words rise up inside of you on the strength of every way in which you've changed, it can be enough.