Romance takes place in the middle distance. Romance is looking in at yourself through a window clouded with dew. Romance means leaving things out: where life grunts and shuffles, romance only sighs.

Neither of us says the word love, not once. It would be tempting fate; it would be romance, bad luck.

I was taking something away from her, although she didn't know it. I was filching. Never mind that it was something she apparently didn't want or had no use for, had rejected even; still, it was hers, and if I took it away, this mysterious "it" I couldn't quite define.

Sometimes there would be couples, arm in arm—laughing, happy, amorous. Victims of an enormous fraud, and at the same time its perpetrators, or so I felt.

We thought we were running away from the grownups, and now we are the grownups.