I still hadn't learned that there is a finite number of people who will ever be interested in you.
. . .
Nobody ever knows if it'll work, said Ximena. That's why you do this shit. To find out.
. . .
That loving a person means letting them change when they need to. And letting them go when they need to. And that doesn't make them any less of a home. Just maybe not one for you. Or only for a season or two. But that doesn't diminish the love. It just changes forms.
. . .
You're not in America anymore. Here we consider people beside ourselves.
. . .
Everyone's doing the best they can, says my mother. It's what we have to tell ourselves.
. . .
He said there are some things that it's better for us to find out on our own.
. . .
But, she says, imagine what it would've taken to make that decision. To pull you away from your father. Think about how I would've thought that through. How it would've eaten me up. That would mean that I'd taken stock of the situation, and I'd decided that you growing up without him was better than growing up with whatever man your father could potentially become, whatever he had become when he left. That would mean that I believed in us — in you and me — more than I did in whoever your father might, just maybe, someday, become. And I would have to live with the consequences of knowing that I might be wrong. And that if I was wrong, I could never take it back. If I was wrong, I would bring that decision to my deathbed.
. . .
The first time [we said I love you] is a memory that I've thinned down to the basics: We are, I think, walking through the neighborhood. I tell Mike that I love it, or that I could learn to love it here. He looks up entirely too quickly, but it's too late. I've already seen his grin. But right there, at the height of a potential catastrophe, Mike points to a house and tells me that he loves the way it leans. I point to a cat sunning under a streetlight and tell Mike I love how it's navigating the world. Mike points to the wildflowers growing next to the road. I point at the lamps above us. We both point behind us, below us, in the corners, through the windows of the houses we're passing, at everywhere but each other, although of course I've since realized that this was an acknowledgement, too.
