London is the Best City in America

I couldn't help but wonder if that was what love was -- believing that someone was going to come through, in the end, and that it would still count

Josh had told me a long time ago that he had this theory that an entire relationship was based on what occurred over the course of the first five minutes you know each other. That everything that came after those first minutes was just details being filled in. Meaning: you already knew how deep the love was, how instinctually you felt about someone. What happened in their first five minutes? Time stopped.

You can't finish the things you weren't supposed to start.

The part where you need to choose among the choices that are there, and not the ones that aren't there anymore. At least not how you need them to be. You're still stuck on some imaginary idea you have of how it could have been. You need to think about how it is now. And how you want it to be.

Why could we say more to each other when it counted less?

I don't think you get to be mad at someone unless they come through for you. I don't think you have that luxury. I think you think you can be mad, but really you're just doing something else." "What's that?" "Waiting.

That was what I feared most: that he just wasn’t excited about us anymore—that something between us had altered irreversibly. And afterward, I started seeing the evidence everywhere: in the way he didn’t sleep facing me anymore, or the way he’d stopped asking me the questions he used to need to know the answers to, the way he stopped needing to tell me things in order for them to count.

If things were eventually going to work out, did it matter how you got there? Didn’t it ultimately just matter that you got the ending you wanted?

Where do we go from here? I started off this crazy weekend by trying to make sense of these moments—these moments that you know you’re going to remember—but like anything else, nothing exists without its opposite. So maybe it makes a certain kind of sense that I ended up thinking about the moments you know you’ll forget. Or, more accurately, try to remember incorrectly. How do we all learn how to do that? Relive something again and again in our heads until it takes on a slightly different light, a less truthful tone, until the memory can’t injure us as directly, until it joins the ranks of the more manageable.

I just think people forget what it feels like to really be in love, you know? Like when that’s the only thing in the world that matters. I just don’t want to decide it’s not that important.

This wasn’t because he liked me, I was sure. It had more to do with him banking on what we of wedding age had all become witnesses to—how during these wedding weekends, single women, feeling a little lonely, maybe, or just feeling a little too far from being the bride, found themselves loosening their own rules, opting to be more flexible, more quickly.

You can’t finish the things you weren’t supposed to start.

newspaper at that very table, and was racing