ALL I WANT IS YOU

what happens when hippies mow the lawn

here we aren't, so quickly

Finally delved into the June 14 fiction issue of the New Yorker. Jonathan Safran Foer's "Here We Aren't, So Quickly" unexpectedly caused my eyes to well with tears. A lovely, melancholy story chronicling a relationship.

Some favorite lines:

You couldn't tolerate people who couldn't tolerate babies on planes. I couldn't tolerate people who insisted that having a coffee after lunch would keep them up all night. At a certain point I could hear my knees and felt no need to correct other people's grammar. How can I explain why foreign cities came to mean so much to me?At a certain point you stopped agonizing over your ambitiousness, but at a certain point you stopped trying. I couldn't tolerate magicians who did things that someone who actually had magical powers would never do....

...I changed and changed, and with more time I will change more. I'm not disappointed, just quiet. Not unthinking, just restless. Not willfully unclear, just trying to say it as it wasn't. The more I remember, the more distant I feel. We reached the middle so quickly. After everything it's like nothing. I have always never been here. What a shame it wasn't easy. What a waste of what? What a joke. But come. Be beside me somewhere: on the split stools of this bar, by the edge of this cliff, in the seats of this borrowed car, at the prow of this ship, on the all-forgiving cushions of this threadbare sofa in this one-story copper-crying fixer upper whose windows we once squinted through for hours before coming to our senses: "What would we even do with such a house?"