The Passage

It’s strange how being happy about one thing can make you just as sad about another.

To me, fair friend, you never can be old,
For as you were when first your eye I ey’d,
Such seems your beauty still.

—SHAKESPEARE,
Sonnet 104

no one, not even his father, had told him how beautiful the night sky was, how it made you feel both small and large at the same time, while also a part of something vast and eternal.

the world seemed far chancier than that, a series of mishaps and narrow escapes you somehow managed to survive until, one day, you didn’t

Like to a Hermite poore in place obscure,
I meane to spend my daies of endles doubt,
To waile such woes as time cannot recure,
Where none but Loue shall euer finde me out.

—SIR WALTER RALEIGH,
from The Phoenix Nest

Someone once told me that part of you lives on so long as somebody remembers you.

We live, we die. Somewhere along the way, if we’re lucky, we may find someone to help lighten the load.

It wasn’t a small thing, to love a person.

For an instant he actually believed something had happened and she’d accidentally released the grenade—that death was, in the end, an affair of light and silence.

I’m not even sure it matters. All those years, waiting for the Army, and it turns out the Army is us.