Aristotle and Dante Dive Into the Waters of the World

is my grief compared to yours?”

I found out that your husband can be a talker. But he doesn’t know how to make small talk.”

I don’t know how he could laugh about all these things. He could get super angry about the screwed-up world we lived in. But he could also be very patient with the world. He had a good dose of cynicism in him. But he wasn’t a bitter man.

Racism? I’m against it.’ We’re all against it. And we feel a solidarity. We make a few changes here and there—but we don’t make any real changes. It’s like we buy a new car but keep driving in the same direction.”

The Raft of the Medusa was your favorite painting.”

MY LIFE TOOK ON A kind of rhythm, the going to school, the talking to school friends that I’d never had before. School friends were good because you could leave them at school. That sounds mean, I know, but for me, my life was really crowded. I don’t think I could have handled one more take-home friend.

I guess you could say I was a failure at turning myself into the invisible man.

“I mean, what happened to the old Ari? The one who sat there, socially disengaged?”
“Socially disengaged?”

Before every school year begins, I feel like crawling under my bed and staying there. I don’t know what it is about the whole school thing that makes me feel anxious. I always feel like I’ve thrown my summers away—well, until I met you.

And I didn’t give a shit that I was young, and I had just turned seventeen and I didn’t give a shit if anyone thought I was too young to feel the things that I felt. Too young? Tell that to my fucking heart.