Until one is actually dead [and then it must be considered impossible], it is difficult to consider anyone as the love of one's life. But only shortly after meeting her, it seemed in no way out of place to think of Chloe in such terms. I cannot with any assurance say why, out of all the available emotions and all their possible recipients, it should suddenly have been love I felt for her. I cannot claim to know the inner dynamics of this process, nor validate these words with anthing other than the authority of lived experience.

both of us felt that we had never spoken like this to anyone before, that all the rest had been compromise and self-deception, that only now were we finally able to understand and make ourselves understood - tyhat the waiting [messanic in nature] was truly over. I recognized in her the woman I had been clumsily seeking allmy life, a being whose qualities had been foreshadowed in my dreams, wose smile and whose eyes, whose sense of humor and whose taste in books, whose anxieties and whose intelligence perfectly matched those of my ideal