So you would, and in writing it down you realize, love is not a tragedy or a failure, but a gift.
You remember your first love because they show you, prove to you, that you can love and be loved, that nothing in this world is deserved except for love, that love is both how you become a person, and why.
—
But underneath those skies, your hand—no, my hand—no, our hand—in his, you don’t know yet. You don’t know that the spiral painting is in that box on your dining room table, with a Post-it note stuck to the back of the frame: Stole this from a lizard for you.—D. You can’t know yet how that painting will follow you from one apartment to another and then eventually to a house, or how decades later, you’ll be so proud that Daisy continues to be your best friend, that growing into different lives only makes you more fiercely loyal to each other. You don’t know that you’d go to college, find a job, make a life, see it unbuilt and rebuilt.
I, a singular proper noun, would go on, if always in a conditional tense.
But you don’t know any of that yet. We squeeze his hand. He squeezes back. You stare up at the same sky together, and after a while he says, I have to go, and you say, Good-bye, and he says, Good-bye, Aza, and no one ever says good-bye unless they want to see you again.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I’d first like to thank Sarah Urist Green, who read many, many, many versions of this story with immense thoughtfulness and generosity. Thanks also to Chris and Marina Waters; my brother, Hank, and sister-in-law, Katherine; my parents, Sydney and Mike Green; my in-laws, Connie and Marshall Urist; and Henry and Alice Green.
Julie Strauss-Gabel has been my editor for more than fifteen years now, and I will never be able to adequately express my gratitude for the faith and wisdom she showed during the six years we spent working together on this book. Thanks also to Anne Heausler for kind and contentious copyediting, and to the entire team at Dutton, especially Anna Booth, Melissa Faulner, Rosanne Lauer, Steve Meltzer, and Natalie Vielkind.
I am profoundly indebted to Elyse Marshall, friend and publicist and confidante and fellow traveler, and to many people at Penguin Random House who’ve helped to make my books and share them with readers. I want to especially thank Jen Loja, Felicia Frazier, Jocelyn Schmidt, Adam Royce, Stephanie Sabol, Emily Romero, Erin Berger, Helen Boomer, Leigh Butler, Kimberly Ryan, Deborah Kaplan, and Lindsey Andrews. Thanks as well to Don Weisberg, and to the brilliant Rosianna Halse Rojas, whose insight and guidance informed every page of this book.
Ariel Bissett, Meredith Danko, Hayley Hoover, Zulaiha Razak, and Tara Covais Varsov read drafts of this manuscript with great care and thoughtfulness. Joanna Cardenas provided invaluable insight and feedback. And for all kinds of help, thanks to Ilene Cooper, Bill Ott, Amy Krouse Rosenthal, Rainbow Rowell, Stan Muller, and Marlene Reeder.
Jodi Reamer and Kassie Evashevski, agents extraordinaire, are the best advocates an author could hope for—and also the most patient. Thanks to Phil Plait for astronomy help; E. K. Johnston for Star Wars expertise; Ed Yong for his book I Contain Multitudes; David Adam for his book The Man Who Couldn’t Stop; Elaine Scarry for her book The Body in Pain; Stuart Hyatt for introducing me to Pogue’s Run; and to James Bell, Michaela Irons, Tim Riffle, Lea Shaver, and Shannon James for their legal expertise. With all that noted, geography, the law, power converters, the night sky, and everything else in this novel are imagined and treated fictitiously, and any mistakes are entirely my own.
Lastly, Dr. Joellen Hosler and Dr. Sunil Patel have made my life immeasurably better by providing the kind of high-quality mental health care that unfortunately remains out of reach for too many. My family and I are grateful. If you need mental health services in the United States, please call the SAMHSA treatment referral helpline: 1-877- SAMHSA7. It can be a long and difficult road, but mental illness is treatable. There is hope, even when your brain tells you there isn’t.