Raphael Bob-Waksberg

it is furthermore becoming increasingly apparent that if I go pick out a Promise Egg without her input I’m going to screw it up, and then it’s going to sit in a display case in our living room for the rest of our marriage—a testament to how badly I screwed it up, a testament to how I always screw things up, a testament to how I will continue to screw things up forever.

You’ve still got the boat ride back to Manhattan to look forward to, and if you load yourself up with too many might-have-beens, the ferry will sink under all that weight.

And I imagined that if I were in some other, better universe, there’d be someone who could tell me, It’s okay, or You’ll get ’em next time, tiger. Someone would tell me that all the stupid things I’d done, all my mistakes, they didn’t matter. This someone would say that, no matter what, she was proud of me, that I filled her heart with warmth, and that that’s really the most you could hope for in life—to just for an instant make somebody else just a little bit happier. She would tell me that—guess what!—everything was going to be all right.