Raphael Bob-Waksberg

it is furthermore becoming increasingly apparent that if I go pick out a Promise Egg without her input I’m going to screw it up, and then it’s going to sit in a display case in our living room for the rest of our marriage—a testament to how badly I screwed it up, a testament to how I always screw things up, a testament to how I will continue to screw things up forever.

You’ve still got the boat ride back to Manhattan to look forward to, and if you load yourself up with too many might-have-beens, the ferry will sink under all that weight.

And I imagined that if I were in some other, better universe, there’d be someone who could tell me, It’s okay, or You’ll get ’em next time, tiger. Someone would tell me that all the stupid things I’d done, all my mistakes, they didn’t matter. This someone would say that, no matter what, she was proud of me, that I filled her heart with warmth, and that that’s really the most you could hope for in life—to just for an instant make somebody else just a little bit happier. She would tell me that—guess what!—everything was going to be all right.

What happened to our society to make it so we view damaged things as somehow incomplete? On the contrary, I, for one, believe it is our damage that makes us whole.

Naw, don’t be fooled by his fancy job, Heather; I promise you that asshole’s as dumb as they come.

Sometimes I feel like I don’t have to tell you things, because I feel like when you look at me, you can see everything.

Most important, though, is the unspoken understanding that both of you are people—weak, wounded, fragile, forgivable people doing the very best you can under the impossible circumstance that is day-to-day existence.

It’s like a movie adaptation of your favorite novel, a theme park ride version of your favorite movie. It’s a Xerox of a Xerox, a shadow of a ghost.

It’s gluten-free pasta, this.

But at least it’s pasta.

This was no great affair, this thing. This was no tragic heartbreak. This was just another thing that happened in a long series of things that happened.

Here’s your stuff back. Have a nice life.

This is question I often ponder. Is better to be truthful? Or is better to keep up appearance, so that others have good thoughts of you, know they can depend? These questions too big for little creature like me. Maybe no correct answers?