Oh my 🥺 the ending left me utterly undone. I’m not even sure I have the right words. The writing is beautiful in its quiet honesty, painfully realistic, and often devastating. A love lived in secrecy, remembered in fragments and doomed by its time. They deserved so much more than the world allowed them. “Desire does not go out like a match, it extinguishes slowly as it burns into ash.” “Nothing touches me more than cracks in the armor and the person who reveals them.” “Have you noticed how the most beautiful landscapes lose their brilliance as soon as our thoughts prevent us from seeing them properly?” “He smiled so that I could take his smile with me.” “This passion that can’t be talked about, that has to be concealed, gives way to the terrible question: if it isn’t talked about, how can one know that it really exists?” “And the feeling of never quite belonging, of being a person uprooted, as if, maybe, who knows, a sense of not belonging is something one inherits.” “In the end, love was only possible because he saw me not as who I was, but as the person I would become.” “His beauty is devastating.” “But absence is, first and foremost, silence.” “He imagines an ascension, some kind of epiphany.” “Why me? He says: Because you are not like all the others, because I don’t see anyone but you and you don’t even realize it. He adds this phrase, which for me is unforgettable: Because you will leave and we will stay.” “Today, I’d like to slap this seventeen-year-old kid, not because of the good grades but because of his incessant need to please those who would judge him.”