A sailor kisses his girl during the blackout in Seattle in 1941

“i’d die for her. i love her so much. i don’t know what i would do without her. she’s going through a lot right now. i wish i could just kiss away the pain, make it go away, stop it, kill it! if she, you know, (gets teary eyed) i don’t know what i would do. i’d kill myself. i love that girl. i love her. i love her almost more than i love myself” 

- johnny depp on winona ryder (1989)

A couple lying in a small boat together, looking up at the sky. Photograph by David E. Scherman. United Kingdom, 1942.

(click to enlarge)

There is a question I have been wanting to understand the answer to, but have been feeling that I simply can’t ask. Eventually I just ask it anyway:

Do you think there was a part of you that imagined the two of you would somehow end up together?

Immediately, I wish that I hadn’t. The look on her face—a kind of juddering visceral alarm at what has been said…I don’t wish to see that look many more times in my life. “That would make me way too sad to answer,” she says quickly, and I hurriedly begin another question, about something completely different, hoping that if I say it fast enough these new words will chase the old words away from where they are hanging in the air between us, and maybe she will let me pretend that it was something I never said.

“No, no,” she says, and I can see the tears forming, and I think she means that she doesn’t want to answer any more questions about anything. I mutter some kind of apology under my breath.

But, even now, I’m wrong about everything. Mostly she is just trying to stop my new question. She has something to tell me.

“No,” she says. “I said it would make me too sad to answer but it’s also…”—and she nods even as her voice breaks once more with tears—”…one of my favorite things to imagine.” And through the tears, a beaming, almost beatific smile stretches room-wide across her face. “It’s actually one of my favorite places to visit.”

Excerpt from GQ February 2012

State of California

GOVERNOR'S OFFICE

SACRAMENTO 95814

RONALD REAGAN

GOVERNOR

My Darling Wife

This note is to warn you of a diabolical plot entered into by some of our so called friends - (ha!) calendar makers and even our own children. These and others would have you believe we've been married 20 years.

20 minutes maybe - but never 20 years. In the first place it is a known fact that a human cannot sustain the high level of happiness I feel for more than a few minutes - and my happiness keeps increasing. 

I will confess to one puzzlement but I'm sure it is just some trick perpetrated by our friends - (Ha again!) I can't remember ever being without you and I know I was born more than 20 mins ago.

Oh well - that isn't important. The important thing is I don't want to be without you for the next 20 years, or 40, or however many there are. I've gotten very used to being happy and I love you very much indeed.

Your Husband of 20 something or other.

Nuit de Noël, 1963 

by Malick Sidibé

Cologne circa 1956

If she is important enough to you, you will find a way.

If she’s not, you will find an excuse.

“I can’t think of any greater happiness than to be with you all the time, without interruption, endlessly, even though I feel that here in this world there’s no undisturbed place for our love, neither in the village nor anywhere else; and I dream of a grave, deep and narrow, where we could clasp each other in our arms as with clamps, and I would hide my face in you and you would hide your face in me, and nobody would ever see us any more.” - Franz Kafka  

"A woman has got to love a bad man once or twice in her life to be thankful for a good one." - Elizabeth Taylor 

Happy Halloween everyone!!

"Do you think I'm wonderful? she asked him one day as they leaned against the trunk of a petrified maple. No, he said. Why? Because so many girls are wonderful. I imagine hundreds of men have called their loves wonderful today, and it's only noon. You couldn't be something that hundreds of others are." - Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

People always say that, when you love someone, nothing in the world matters. But that's not true, is it? You know, and I know, that when you love someone, everything in the world matters a little but more." - Jodi Picoult

“I will love you until the chances of us running into one another slip from slim to zero, and until your face is fogged by distant memory.” - Lemony Snicket, Beatrice Letters 

“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.”

The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return. - Moulin Rouge