He wanted things to add up, but they didn’t.
Some were less, and some were more.

You droned on, demolishing in the space of a few hours any previous possibility you might have been deemed interesting.

They had gone so long without, a compliment would have destroyed them.

Messages on walls or mirrors, invariably perceived as more urgent than those typed on a computer.

A grey, windy, wet morning—beautiful and alive in a way a more perfect one could never be.

He said that the better you got to know someone, the less you liked them. Animals were the opposite. Of course, you could never really know anyone. Each human being inhabited a vast chasm that could never be filled. The best you could manage was a few shovelfuls of dirt, ten miles away and ten miles down.

I still see them from time to time, taking their daily walk. How I’d hoped for that for us.

Another word for conceptual: simplistic.

A tiny miscalculation, compounded daily.

Another word for provocateur: asshole.