Norwegian Wood

I wanted to begin a new life where I didn't know a soul.

"I suppose I don't really understand you yet," I said. "I'm not all that smart. It takes me a while to understand things. But if I do have the time, I will come to understand you - better than anyone else in the world."

If you don't want to spend time in an insane asylum, you have to open up a little more and let yourself go with life's natural flow.

"I broke up with him. Just like that." Midori put a Marlboro in her mouth, shielded it with her hand as she lit up, and inhaled.

"Why?"

""Why?'!" she screamed. "Are you crazy? You know the English subjunctive, you understand trigonometry, you can read Marx, and 313

you don't know the answer to something as simple as that? Why do you even have to ask? Why do you have to make a girl say something like this? I like you more than I like him, that's all. I wish I had fallen in love with somebody a little more handsome, of course. But I didn't.

I fell in love with you!"

But your problems are not going to continue for the rest of your life," I said, touching her back. "They'll end eventually. And when they do, we'll stop and think about how to go on from there. Maybe you will have to help me. We're not running our lives according to some account book. If you need me, use me.

And worse, I was in love. Love with complications. Scenery was the last thing on my mind

All of us (by which I mean all of us, both normal and not-so-normal) are imperfect human beings living in an imperfect world. We don't live with the mechanical precision of a bank account or by measuring all our lines and angles with rulers and protractors. Am I right?

Why did such a beautiful body have to be so ill? I wondered

We shook hands and went our separate ways, he to his new world, and I back to my swamp.

wrapped my arms around her as carefully as if I had been holding a work of art delicately fashioned from glass.