“So your perfect proposal, what would it be?" Ben asks. "Seriously?"... "I don't know. It would just be the two of us, and I guess I'd want him to say something honest, not overly romantic, not something that would make a great story to tell his friends. I'd just want him to lean over..." As I say it, I lean slightly toward Ben, close enough that I can feel the warmth of his body radiating into the empty space between us, and drop the volume of my voice. "... and say 'Janelle Tenner, fucking marry me.”
“the book I was reading turned out to be crack”
“Life is a fragile thing. Apparently the whole world is fragile too.”
“When the zipper snaps open, Ben pauses, his breath hot in my ear. "Janelle Tenner," he whispers. "I fucking love you.”
“He takes two steps back. Closer to the portal.
I can't stop myself. "Ben," I call. And I'm not even embarrassed about how helpless my voice sounds.
Don't go.
"I'll come back for you." He takes another step back. "I promise."
Stay.
"Janelle Tenner," he says. "I will always fucking love you." And then he takes one more step back. Into the portal.
And the blackness swallows him whole.”
“Apparently this month is full of surprises. No one is as dumb as I thought they were.”
“I mean, contrary to popular belief, I'm actually not harboring a secret desire to grow up and become a bioterrorist.”
“Reaching out, I grab his hand and intertwine my fingers with his. And I move into his space until we're not even an inch from each other. Laying my forehead on his chest, I take a deep breath and feel his whole body relax, as if tension is rolling off his body in waves.
I was always the kid who loved the smell of gasoline.
His free hand comes up, and his fingers slip through my hair before his hand settles between my shoulder blades.
"Ben," I say into his shirt.
"Janelle," he whispers back, and I can feel his mouth against my hair. I can feel him smile.”
“Humans have precious few instincts, but that's because we don't listen to them. We let logic and knowledge get in the way. My dad always said that when instincts are at war with something society has taught you, listen to your instincts first and ask questions later. ”
“Those deep set eyes that look like they could tell stories for days, and that wavy brown hair that feels soft between my fingers. I try to memorize the angles of his jaw and the lines of his lips, because I know.
I know this may be the last time I ever see him.
Breathe fills my lungs, my throat relaxes, and I can't help but smile. Because I can see what he's thinking as clearly as if he'd spoken.
He doesn't want to leave - he doesn't want to go home.
He's going to choose me instead.”
“And the way it felt?" I whisper, as if that might soften the blow of embarrassment I'm about to deal. "Is that how you were feeling - how you feel - about me?"
A breeze comes off the ocean, and my skin feels strangely empty and open as he gives an almost imperceptible nod.”
“Lives are made of strings of moments, and every once in a while, one of those moments is pivotal and defining. It changes everything, alters you so completely that when you look back, there’s a clear before and after”
“And the emotion I feel is undoubtedly love-heart aching, chest filling, so powerful it hurts, like on of these memories of someone watching me, someone whose happiest moments are when he sees me smile, and someone who aches and feels powerless and heartbroken when he knows I'm sad. Someone who loves me.”
“I told you. There’s nothing heroic here, nothing for the writer’s pen. I had thoughts like, It’s not wartime, why should I have to risk myself while someone else is sleeping with my wife? Why me again, and not him? To be honest, I didn’t see any heroes there. I saw nutcases, who didn’t care about their own lives, and I had enough craziness myself, but it wasn’t necessary. I also have medals and awards—but that’s because I wasn’t afraid of dying. I didn’t care! It was even something of an out. They’d have buried me with honors. And the government would have paid for it.”
“In the modern period, similar ideas are reiterated, for example, by an important political thinker who described what he called “a definite trend in the historic development of mankind,” which strives for “the free unhindered unfolding of all the individual and social forces in life.” The author was Rudolf Rocker, a leading twentieth-century anarchist thinker and activist.3 He was outlining an anarchist tradition culminating in his view in anarcho-syndicalism—in European terms, a variety of “libertarian socialism.” These”
“I feel an emptiness open in my chest, coupled with a strange downward pull in my throat. I think, this is my heart sinking.”
“Falling in love, we said; I fell for him. We were falling women. We believed in it, this downward motion: so lovely, like flying, and yet at the same time so dire, so extreme, so unlikely. God is love, they once said, but we reversed that, and love, like heaven, was always just around the corner. The more difficult it was to love the particular man beside us, the more we believed in Love, abstract and total. We were waiting, always, for the incarnation. That word, made flesh.
And sometimes it happened, for a time. That kind of love comes and goes and is hard to remember afterwards, like pain. You would look at the man one day and you would think, I loved you, and the tense would be past, and you would be filled with a sense of wonder, because it was such an amazing and precarious and dumb thing to have done; and you would know too why your friends had been evasive about it, at the time.
There is a good deal of comfort, now, in remembering this.”
“Well, enlighten me, please.” She looked up and scratched her head. “In the event of something unfortunate happening to you, who would you like us to call first?” “A funeral home.”
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