Everything offended Jessica, which is inevitable when you move through the world in search of offense. - Emily St. John Mandel

Isn’t that reality? Won’t most of us die in fairly unclimactic ways, our passing unremarked by almost everyone, our deaths becoming plot points in the narratives of the people around us?

Frank standing on a stool on his wondrously functional pre-Libya legs, the bullet that would sever his spinal cord still twenty-five years away but already approaching: a woman giving birth to a child who will someday pull the trigger on a gun, a designer sketching the weapon or its precursor, a dictator making a decision that will spark in the fullness of time into the conflagration that Frank will go overseas to cover for Reuters, the pieces of a pattern drifting closer together.

She never dwelt on my lapses, and I couldn’t entirely parse why this made me feel so awful. There’s a low-level, specific pain in having to accept that putting up with you requires a certain generosity of spirit in your loved ones.