Cynthia D'Aprix Sweeney

Right now, it felt like there was nowhere for his thoughts to alight that wasn't rife with land mines of regret or anger or guilt.

Jack picked a piece of mint from his glass and chewed on it for a second. ____ curious,_ he said,__s telling someone to relax ever helpful? It__ like saying __reathe_ to someone who ishyperventilating or __wallow_ to a person who__ choking. It__ a completely useless admonition.

This is nice,' Melody said, picking up a red leather box with a vintage watch inside.'Yes, it is nice. It's the watch I gave Walker as a wedding gift.''He gave it back?''Actually, he sold it back to the person I bought it from who alerted me and I reacquired it.''I'm sorry. That sounds upsetting.''It was. Very. Especially since he sold the watch to buy combs for my long hair and without knowing what he had done I sold my hair to buy a leather case for this watch.

This was the part she hated, the part of a relationship that always nudged her to bail, the part where someone else__ misery or expectations or neediness crept into her carefully prescribed world. It was such a burden, other people__ lives. She did love Leo. She__ loved him in a host of different ways at different times in their lives, and she did want whatever their current thing was to continue. Probably. But she always came back to this: She was so much better at being alone; being alone came more naturally to her. She led a life of deliberate solitude, and if occasional loneliness crept in, she knew how to work her way out of that particular divot.

They__ fallen into their old ways, accusatory and evasive, which was reassuring in a perverted way. Leo understood the nasty pull of the regrettable familiar, how the old grooves could be so much more satisfying than the looming unknown. It__ addicts stayed addicts.

So the first time she and Leo combusted, she'd practically been poised for the breakup. In some inexplicable way, she'd been looking forward to it and all its attendant drama, because wasn't there something nearly lovely__hen you were young enough__bout guts churning and tear ducts being put to glorious overuse? She recognized the undeniable satisfaction of the first emotional fissure because an unraveling was still something grown-up and, therefore, life affirming. See? The broken heart signalled. I loved enough to lose; I felt enough to weep. Because when you were young enough, the stakes of love were so very small, nearly insignificant. How tragic could a breakup be when it was part of the fabric of expectation from the beginning? The hackneyed fights, the late-night phone calls, the indignant recounting for friends over multiple drinks and in earshot of an appropriately flirtatious bartender__t was theatre for a certain type of person . . . Until it wasn't.

People abandoned one another constantly without performing the courtesy of of actually disappearing. They left, but didn't, lurking about, a constant reminder of what could or should have been.

True patriotism, Jack believed, would have been for his fellow Americans to look inward after 9/11 and accept a little blame, admit the attacks had happened, in part, because of who they were in the world, not in spite of it.

[Jack:] 'I was twenty-four when I met Walker. Do you know I've never lived alone? I'm forty-four years old and I've never lived alone. The first few weeks Walker was gone, I didn't know what to do with myself. I'd stay in the store until late, pick up some takeout, and just watch television until I fell asleep.'[... Melody:] 'Sounds kind of great right