The Time Traveler's Wife

"I have a sudden glimpse of all the Christmases of my life lined up one after another, waiting to be gotten through, and despair floods me. No. I wish for a moment that Time would lift me out of this day, and into some more benign one. But then I feel guilty for wanting to avoid the sadness; dead people need us to remember them, even if it eats us, even if all we can do is say I'm sorry until it is as meaningless as air. I don't want to burden this warm festive restaurant with grief [. . .] so I pay and leave."

"Dad beats me to it; he's sitting in the breakfast room with his hands wrapped around a dainty cup of steaming black joe. I pour one for myself and sit across from him. Thorugh the lace-curtained windows the weak light gives Dad a ghostly look; he's a colorized version of a black and white movie of himself this morning. His hair is standing up every which way and without thinking I smooth mine down, as though he were a mirror. He does the same, and we smile."

"The hardest lesson is Clare's solitude. Sometimes I come home and Clare seems kind of irritated; I've interrupted some train of throught, broken into the dreamy silence of her day. Sometimes I see an expression on Clare's face that is like a closed door. She has gone inside the room of her mind. [. . .] I've discovered that Clare likes to be alone. But when i return from time traveling she is always relived to see me. When the woman you live with is an artist, every day is a surprise."

"And I have told him everything. The beginning, the learning, the rush of surviving and the pleasure of knowing ahead, the terror of knowing things that can't be averted, the anguish of loss. Now we sit in silence and finally he raises his head and looks at me. In Kendrick's light eyes is a sadness that I want to undo; after laying everything before him I want to take it all back and leave, excuse him from the burden of having to think about any of this. he reaches for his cigarettes, selects one, lights it, inhales and then exhales a blue cloud that turns white as it crosses the path of the light along with its shadow."

" 'To find out what?'
'Whatever is is. Whatever you are.' Kendrick smiles and I notice that his teeth are uneven and yellowed. He stands, extends his hand, and I shake it, thank him; there's an awkward pause: we are strangers again after the intimacies of the afternoon, and then I walk out of his office, down stairs, into the street where the sun has been waiting for me. Whatever I am. What am I? What am I?"

Audrey Niffenegger, The Time Traveler's Wife