We stood there, facing each other. It was raining harder now, and the big, fat drops were running down my face, and his too, as he loomed over me.

"Just say it." His voice was tight and his teeth were clenched and I could see the muscle in his jaw working.

"What?" I lifted my shoulders, cocked my elbows, raised my palms to the weeping sky. "What do you want me to say?" Trying hard for insouciance.

"You're sorry. Just say you're sorry."

"Sloan, it's too late for apologies-"

"Fuck you!" He slammed his fist into the brick wall next to my head. "Fuck apologies. I don't want apologies. I just want to hear it. I want to hear once that you are sorry, like you really mean it. No fucking excuses. No explanations. Just once, that you are as sorry as I am..." He was crying, I think. I was too. I sank back against the wet brick and covered my face with my hands, then slid down the wall, like a body shot through the heart.

"I'm sorry," I sobbed. "You don't know how sorry-"

And then suddenly he was all around me, gathering me up and crushing me against the wet brick, kissing the rain. And I realized I'd never been gathered up before, never been so broken apart or so recovered, and it was shocking, but before I could think about it, we were walking really fast through streets that flowed like a river, to arrive, dripping, at the stolid Peabody. Up the brass elevator, across the densely carpeted hall, to the door where I fumbled for the key (remembering the last time I stood at a door at the Peabody, fumbling for a key), but before I could think about it, the door swung open and Sloan backed me through, across the room, and onto the big, redeeming bed.

It wasn't easy. It wasn't like we made love and it was this enormous flood that washed away all our sins and insufficiencies, although from time to time that was how it felt. Rather, we had to negotiate a way through layers of nakedness and conjunction, stopping and starting, asking questions, filling in gaps and testing the waters. But we did it. Dove, then rose again to reach a plateau where we could rest, breathing deep and easy. Until another accusation surfaced. A doubt insisted on address. And so we would start again, and so we continued, off and on, all night, until morning.

My Year of Meats Ruth L. Ozeki

I miss your smile.
I miss your laugh.
I miss your eyes,
I miss your joy

But most I miss this little entity, it was everything that was you, that would drift around your entire being and when I was near fill in me.
I feel incomplete without it
severed into only half of me
bleeding outwardly
the longing hurts beyond everything
if continued the only me I ever knew would end
So this is goodbye, and for as long as I can keep it
this is goodbye forever
you won't understand
but just please let me go
please, entirely, let go

Paul Varjak: I love you.
Holly Golightly: So what.
Paul Varjak: So what? So plenty! I love you, you belong to me!
Holly Golightly: [tearfully] No. People don't belong to people.
Paul Varjak: Of course they do!
Holly Golightly: I'll never let ANYBODY put me in a cage.
Paul Varjak: I don't want to put you in a cage, I want to love you!
Paul Varjak: You know what's wrong with you, Miss Whoever-you-are? You're chicken, you've got no guts. You're afraid to stick out your chin and say, "Okay, life's a fact, people do fall in love, people do belong to each other, because that's the only chance anybody's got for real happiness." You call yourself a free spirit, a "wild thing," and you're terrified somebody's gonna stick you in a cage. Well baby, you're already in that cage. You built it yourself. And it's not bounded in the west by Tulip, Texas, or in the east by Somali-land. It's wherever you go. Because no matter where you run, you just end up running into yourself.
[takes out the ring and throws it in Holly's lap]
Paul Varjak: Here. I've been carrying this thing around for months. I don't want it anymore.

Quicksand

A fair Scandinavian girl in love with life, with love, with passion, dreaming, and risking all in one blind surrender. A cruel sacrifice. In forgetting all but love she had forgotten, or had perhaps never known, that somethings the world never forgives. Nella Larsen

Tonight I ran at sundown, mid-run I stopped to walk awhile. The shoots of pink spreading down the sky. I thought to myself how beautiful life was, and a tear moved down my cheek. I saw an airplane glide into the wide expanse of sky that will be experienced for the first time and I felt, for a change, that I would not desire for all the world to be on it. I was exactly where I wanted to be.

Free Bird

If I leave here tomorrow
Would you still remember me?
For I must be travelling on, now,
'Cause there's too many places I've got to see.
But, if I stayed here with you, girl,
Things just couldn't be the same.
'Cause I'm as free as a bird now,
And this bird you can not change.
Lord knows, I can't change.

Bye, bye, its been a sweet love.
Though this feeling I can't change.
But please don't take it badly,
'Cause Lord knows I'm to blame.
But, if I stayed here with you girl,
Things just couldn't be the same.
Cause I'm as free as a bird now,
And this bird you'll never change.
And this bird you can not change.
Lord knows, I can't change.
Lord help me, I can't change.

Dear Brian

I am sorry. I was wrong. I realized something tonight as I listened in irritation to a man who found it impossible to enunciate. Do I really want the world to all enunciate? The irritation in me eagerly declared "Dear God yes!" but do I? It's just one, rather large step, toward conformity. Why not let people just be? I have never desired for every person to be uniform, and yet here I was irritated by difference. If you love this girl, as much as you claim you do, I think you should tell her. But it doesn't make you wrong not to. You're giving her up because you truly believe her life will be better for it, and I insinuated it was cowardly. Your truly beautiful. I dearly hope, if I ever found myself in that position, I could be as honorable as you.