"I thought I understood it.
That I could grasp it.
But I didn’t, not really.
Only the smudgeness of it.
The pink-slippered, all-containered, semi-precious eagerness of it.
I didn’t realize it would sometimes be more than whole.
That the wholeness was a rather luxurious idea.
Because it’s the halves that halve you in half.
Didn’t know, don’t know about the in-between bits.
The gory bits of you and gory bits of me."

"I choose to stay with him for all the things that he had done right, and not to leave him for that one thing that he had done wrong."

"I got tired, I told him. Not worn out, but worn through. Like one of those wives who wakes up one morning and says I can’t bake any more bread.
You never bake bread, he wrote, and we were still joking.
Then it’s like I woke up and baked bread, I said, and we were joking even then. I wondered will there come a time when we won’t be joking? And what would it look like? And how would that feel?
When I was a girl, my life was music that was always getting louder. Everything moved me. A dog following a stranger. That made me feel so much. A calender that showed the wrong month. I could have cried over it. I did. Where the smoke from the chimney ended. How an overturned bottle rested at the edge of a table.
I spent my life learning to feel less.
Every day I felt less.
Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?
You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness."