Rebecca Serle

The future is the one thing you can count on not abandoning you, kid, he’d said. The future always finds you. Stand still, and it will find you. The way the land just has to run to sea.

—MARIANNE WIGGINS, EVIDENCE OF THINGS UNSEEN

That I hadn’t already entangled myself so deeply—marriage, a house, a life that is not movable, at least not without destruction.

The difference between being good and bad at something is just interest,” Carol says. “Would you like to learn?”

Is familiarity a taste? Or just an accustomed tolerance?

He’s such an alpha male

History, memory is by definition fiction. Once an event is no longer present, but remembered, it is narrative. And we can choose the narratives we tell—about our own lives, our own stories, our own relationships. We can choose the chapters we give meaning.

Always arrive on time to a restaurant and five minutes late to a house.