When he had promised himself that he wouldn't try to repair Jude, he had forgotten that to solve someone is to want to repair them: to diagnose a problem and then not try to fix that problem seemed not only neglectful but immoral.

But now he knew: you always sacrificed something. The question was what you sacrificed.

But they're your parents," Malcolm said to him once a year or so. "You can't just stop talking to them." But you could, and you did: he was proof of that. It was like any relationship, he felt—it took constant pruning, and dedication, and vigilance, and if neither party wanted to make the effort, why wouldn't it wither?

....or drive up to his parents' house, one of you plugging into the car's stereo an outlandish playlist, with which you would both sing along, loudly, being extravagantly silly as adults the way you never were as children. As you got older, you realize that really, there were very few people you truly wanted to be around for more than a few days at a time, and yet here you were with someone you wanted to be around for years, even when he was at his most opaque and confusing.

Opposite Willem that afternoon is a Thom Gunn poem: "Their relationship consisted / In discussing if it existed." Underneath, someone has written in black market, "Dont worry man I cant get no pussy either.