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400 pages, Hardcover
First published April 25, 2023
”in every universe, it’s you for me.
even if it’s not me for you.”
”you are in all of my happiest places. you are where my mind goes when it needs to be soothed.”
“i thought i made you […] just by wishing.”
“stupid, stupid, stupid heart. don’t you know he hasn't been yours to cry over for a long time?”
“it’s this feeling like the universe is compacting around me while something in my rib cage is expanding. i’m the culmination of their lost dreams, their missed other lives, and at the same time, they’re proud of me.”
“i sit on the edge of the bed, feeling the loneliness swell, not knowing whether it's pressing against me from the outside or growing from within. either way, it's inescapable, my oldest companion.”
" I think I love you, Harriet,” he says.❜
"I know I love you, Wyn.”
"The only way I can bear loving anyone this much is knowing it will never turn to poison. Knowing we’ll give each other up before we can destroy each other.”
"You’ve spent months trying to forget what you’re missing, I tell myself. How will you survive being reminded? Living the loss of it all over again?"
" I wanted to be special, Harriet,” he says. “And since I wasn’t, I settled for trying to make everyone love me. I know how ridiculous that sounds, but it’s true. I spent my whole life chasing things and people who could make me feel like I mattered."
"Our love is a place we can always come back to, and it will be waiting, the same as it ever was.
You belong here."
"The irony of it all strikes me then: working so hard to earn their love and pride, and it’s brought me no closer to them. If anything, I think maybe it’s kept them at a distance."
"He looks too earnest, too lost, like he’s desperately trying to understand.
Like he can’t fathom that all my love for him didn’t just vanish, the way his did for me. That it had to go somewhere, and funneling it into anger is how I’ve managed to make it through these last two days.
It makes me feel alone. It makes me feel defeated"
"I can’t help but think he doesn’t look any happier than I feel."
"So many of his details are slightly different, but my heart still sees him and whispers into my veins, You."
"Home, I think. That’s new.
But it’s not. It’s been growing there for a while, this new room in my heart, this space just for Wyn that I carry with me everywhere I go."
" I am in that phase of love where you’re sure no two people have ever felt this way before."
"It wasn’t that he was angry. It wasn’t that he didn’t trust me.
He just didn’t want me anymore."
"He was never yours to keep, and deep down you knew that.
I watched him fade from me, bit by bit, day by day, a mirage receding into nothingness."
« The silence leaves too much room for questions, for memories to vine around me, hold me captive. »
"I would’ve done anything to bring you back to me for one last minute."
"I’ve memorized the rhythm of his breathing when he sleeps and the smell of his skin when he’s been out in the sun, and I know when he’s afraid."
"Want is a kind of thief. It’s a door in your heart, and once you know it’s there, you’ll spend your life longing for whatever’s behind it "
"And it feels like taking a shot of tequila every time I hear it. Like I could get drunk on the sound of you. Or hungover when I go too long without you."
" I was afraid they’d ask me what went wrong, and no matter what answer I cobbled together from the rubble, they’d see right through it.
They’d know I wasn’t enough."