I can tell he lost someone close somehow. You can feel that in people, an openness, or maybe it's an opening that you're talking into. With other people, people who haven't been through something like that, you feel the solid wall.

She rested her head against his and felt, for the first time, what she would often feel with him: a self-affection. He made her like herself. With him, she was at ease: her skin felt as though it was her right size.

Brain ablaze. Feel like we are unearthing something and finding ourselves, knowing ourselves, stripping odd layers of our upbringing like old paint. Can't write about it fully yet. Don't understand it. I only know that when F leaves and B and I talk I feel like I am saying - and hearing - the first wholly honest words of my life.

We went from French to a sort of hybrid of the Catalan and Castilian that he taught me, and I wonder if that's part of the reason I don't miss him, that everything we ever said to each other was in languages I'm starting to forget.

Is it always that way with men, that first burst of love or sex the thing that binds you? Do you always have to harken back to those first weeks when just the way he walked across a room made you want to take off all your clothes?

It was so awful and weird. I could see all the things I had loved about him, I could see them, but I didn't love them anymore.

For long stretches of time it felt like we were crawling around each other's brain.