The day I met you I tore up all my maps

I finished Breakable You Sunday night. I have been thinking about it since then, trying to compose the words. My mom said it would make me cry, but I didn't anticipate it making me cry.

On the surface level it is about a family. Divorced parents. A writer father, psychiatrist mother, and philosophy PhD student daughter. But really is it about the choices we make in life. It is about love. It is about people making choices for love or making choices for a certain lifestyle. Brian Morton writes beautifully. I had to bend over many pages...

"Every time he saw her, he wanted to turn himself off to her, but every time he saw her, something about her overwhelmed his intentions."

I know that moment. The moment when you really like someone but you don't have the time. Don't want to make the time. But there they are. Irresistible.

"We love some people because of what we see in them; we love others because of what they help us see in ourselves...he was the only person she had loved for both reasons...when she was with him, the world seemed calmer; the world seemed to make more sense. And when she was with him, she had felt - well, she had never been able to decide whether she had felt more than herself or more like herself."

It is interesting the effect someone else can have on you. On the way you perceive yourself. The way you perceive your world.

"...it wasn't just sex anymore. He wanted this. He wanted her. He wanted to be here, walking through the park with her, holding her hand."

I'm saying these words: holding hands is great.

"'The day I met you I tore up all my maps'...'I can still remember what I was thinking when I read that line,' he said. 'I remember wondering if love was really like that. I remember wondering if I could ever feel that way about anyone.' He didn't need to say more."

The romanticism of that one line of poetry. Makes me smile. Makes me look up the author - Nizar Qabbani. I would welcome him to my closet hopeless romantic club but he refuses to be closeted. In the poem that line is from he continues:

God how is it that we surrender
to love giving it the keys to our city
carrying candles to it and incense
falling down at its feet asking
to be forgiven
Why do we look for it and endure
all that it does to us
...
I knew when I said
I love you
that I was inventing a new alphabet
for a city where no one could read
...
Your image is engraved
on the face of my watch
It is engraved on each of the hands
It is etched on the weeks
months years
My time is no longer mine
it is you

In case that was too sappy, here is a sad romantic one if that is what you need.

"Duration means nothing. Souls know no time. She had revived him, she had redeemed the idea of the future, and if he'd never met her he might have died of old age without having come back to life. The map of his life had been redrawn before he died, and she was at its center. She ws at its heart."

This is where I cried. Because she is heartbroken and has a thought flash through her mind. That she was just a short and fiery blip on his radar. A momentary flash that in the end doesn't mean much at all. But she wasn't. She meant everything to him.

"Jean-Paul Sartre said that when you ask someone for advice, you've already decided what you're going to do, becuase we know the advice each of our friends will give, and when we choose who to ask we reveal that we've already chosen what to do."
Brian Morton