He looked at me kindly. "You probably want to sleep a little, yes?"I did, very much, and I finally went downstairs. And I thought, on the way down to my room, and on the way down into sleep, of all the people in the world dragging themselves from old property to new property, along oceans and highways and Ridge Street, and arriving, in the end, sawed into pieces. I thought of my kindly, handsome father, alone in that enormous house, and how he'd never make up with Misha, though they had both loved my mother. America was too large; America with its houses, its highways; it had broken them up, and me as well. No matter what happened with Arielle (and nothing, I may as well tell you now, happened with Arielle), I would never have Jillian back, could never haver her back, did not even want her back, which was the whole trouble--because all the people I'd loved once, or even just knew once, were scattered, never to be seen again in one place. So that all the feelings are expended, received, that one felt at the core of one's being, had turned, in the course of things, to dust.
And outside already it was growing dark.
Keith Gessen, All the Sad Young Literary Men
