Everything in life goes away or is taken from you before you are done with it. The present is always dark, since by having any moment you destroy the possibility of having it again. If death meant that you could see someone only once a decade for half an hour, and not that you could never see that person again, it would be a very different business. I have to be careful with my memories: they are like those pictures whose colors fade slowly in boxes or rapidly in the sun. I save certain memories and do not touch them, so that they will not get used up. I know that a time will come when the memories of my mother that I have traced as vividly as I can in these pages will seem as unreal as if they were someone else’s memories. Then I will take out the other memories, the ones I do not allow myself to describe here, and I will lose myself in them. They will no doubt be brittle by that point, but they will still be real to me, and I will keep them by my side, and regret that life is not a crazy salad, that it operates in sequences and progressions, and that nothing that has happened ever happens again.

• • •

I suppose it is not surprising that Bernard and I were to break up within six weeks of that dinner with my parents. It is not surprising, but it was nonetheless shocking and horrifying to me. What you expect is perhaps somewhat easier than what you do not expect, but not much. Bernard and I had had an enormously peaceful relationship and a day-to-day life that functioned exquisitely, and though one cannot, perhaps, live for such things, they are in their way almost as beguiling as true love. Bernard and I were not—at least in relation to each other—very passionate people, and the demeanor of passion that we had partially sustained in the early months of our relationship had been allowed to fall away. Domesticity is passion spread very thin. Still, it has all passion’s vulnerability. It is, whatever its shortcomings, a way of life, and to leave it behind is terrible. In the last weeks of our relationship, I found Bernard ridiculous and unimportant and inadequate, but when the end came I was more miserable than I had ever been before.