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The match could not have been more perfect: our two closest friends in the world — my best friend of fifteen years, your former college roommate, both simultaneously single at last. After half a decade of half-secret crushes, missed connections and ill-timed rendezvous, the timing was finally right. And a month later it was over. Read more
“I am — or I was — one of those people who pride themselves in on their willpower, on their ability to make a decision and carry it through. This virtue, like most virtues, is ambiguity itself. People who believe that they are strong-willed and the masters of their destiny can only continue to believe this by becoming specialists in self-deception. Their decisions are not really decisions at all — a real decision makes one humble, one knows that it is at the mercy of more things than can be named — but elaborate systems of evasion, of illusion, designed to make themselves and the world appear to be what they and the world are not. This is certainly what my decision, made so long ago in Joey’s bed, came to. I had decided to allow no room in the universe for something which shamed and frightened me. I succeeded very well — by not looking at the universe, by not looking at myself, by remaining, in effect, in constant motion.”
James Baldwin | Giovanni’s Room