She was not brokenhearted because the relationship had ended suddenly; she was brokenhearted because it had never truly ended.

Technically, on the spectrum of very bad things, they did nothing truly wicked. But of course, that spectrum has no measure for the greatest of all carnal sins, the kind that occurs before skin touches...

There was something horribly depressing, she felt, about watching the weather report. That life could be planned like the perfect summer picnic drained it of spontaneity.

Occasionally, she wondered if all couples struggled so much to understand one another, spoke so little at dinner together, spent so much time camped out in front of the TV. Did all women sometimes feel...

The map was just an accessory. She knew exactly where she was.

It was understood that they shared the same thresholds–the same inexhaustible appetite for wasting time, for discussing lofty ideas, for dissecting trivial things, for driving to nowhere in particular, for listening to music, for talking...

Time passed at an accelerated pace. They could be sitting in traffic or talking on the phone or waiting in line for a movie, and their time felt precious, important, worthwhile.

Was it possible there was some fatal flaw in their matching, that they were ultimately, impossibly different–dissimilar enough to fall in love, but too fundamentally distinct to stay together?

And she had been in love enough times to rule out the possibility that this was merely some feat of nostalgia.

Physical attraction did its part to glue them together, but something stronger than sexual attraction sealed the bond. When men and women grow apart, it is for the same reason they are drawn together; because...

If anything was, that the world will always–it can only–disappoint.