I read Endless Love a few weeks back, belatedly and finally on my friend Marchelle’s unshakeable insistence. It was fortuitous, I think, that I found it at this age. In this approaching winter of the first half of my life, when I can relate to David only as a sort of fading apparition. Myself in some time-jaundiced snapshot taken at Trout Lake Camp, 20 years prior. Familiar but detached. Me but not so much a part of me anymore.

It is lucky to be where I can love a book like this but not be bent or drowned by it as a siren or an unrelenting call for discontent.

This is a passing of sorts, I want to explain to you. A passage, for beautiful better and for sad, practical worse: when we have aged far enough not to be undone by a particular sort of novel but still to remember some fresh cut, green stemmed, selfish version of ourselves that would have been.

To appreciate the fiercely, gorgeously, almost relate-able and still, keep our balance. To hold steady.

It’s almost as good a thing now as being swept away was then.