Chapter xxxvi
WE’VE KNOWN EACH OTHER FOR ALMOST HALF OUR lives.
I’ve seen you smiling, confident, blissfully happy.
I’ve seen you broken, wounded, lost.
But I’ve never seen you like this.
You taught me to look for beauty. In darkness, in destruction, you always found light.
I don’t know what beauty I’ll find here, what light. But I’ll try. I’ll do it for you. Because I know you would do it for me.
There was so much beauty in our life together.
Maybe that’s where I should start.
SOMETIMES OBJECTS SEEM LIKE THEY’VE WITNESSED history. I used to imagine that the wooden table we sat around during Kramer’s Shakespeare seminar our senior year was as old as Columbia—that it had been in that room since 1754, edges worn smooth by centuries of students like us, which of course couldn’t be true. But that’s how I pictured it. Students sitting there through the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, both World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, the Persian Gulf.
It’s funny, if you asked me who else was with us that day, I don’t think I could tell you. I used to be able to see all their faces so clearly, but thirteen years later
