Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close

overturned bottle rested at the edge of a table.
    I spent my life learning to feel less.
    Every day I felt less.
    Is that growing old? Or is it something worse?
    You cannot protect yourself from sadness without protecting yourself from happiness.
    He hid his face in the covers of his daybook, as if the covers were his hands. He cried. For whom was he crying?
    For Anna?
    For his parents?
    For me?
    For himself?
    I pulled the book from him. It was wet with tears running down the pages, as if the book itself were crying. He hid his face in his hands. Let me see you cry, I told him.
    I do not want to hurt you, he said by shaking his head left to right.
    It hurts me when you do not want to hurt me, I told him. Let me see you cry.
    He lowered his hands. On one cheek it said YES backward. On one cheek it said NO backward. He was still looking down. Now the tears did not run down his cheeks, but fell from his eyes to the ground. Let me see you cry, I said. I did not feel that he owed it to me. And I did not feel that I owed it to him. We owed it to each other, which is something different.
    He raised his head and looked at me.
    I am not angry with you, I told him.
    You must be.
    I am the one who broke the rule.
    But I am the one who made the rule you couldn't live with.
    My thoughts are wandering, Oskar. They are going to Dresden, to my mother's pearls, damp with the sweat of her neck. My thoughts are going up the sleeve of my father's overcoat. His arm was so thick and strong. I was sure it would protect me for as long as I lived. And it did. Even after I lost him. The memory of his arm wraps around me as his arm used to. Each day has been chained to the previous one. But the weeks have had wings. Anyone who believes that a second is faster than a decade did not live my life.
    Why are you leaving me?
    He wrote, I do not know how to live.
    I do not know either, but I am trying.
    I do not know how to try.
    There were things I wanted to tell him. But I knew they would hurt him. So I buried them, and let them hurt me.
    I put my hand on him. Touching him was always so important to me. It was something I lived for. I never could explain why. Little, nothing touches. My fingers against his shoulder. The outsides of our thighs touching as we squeezed together on the bus. I couldn't explain it, but I needed it. Sometimes I imagined stitching all of our little touches together. How many hundreds of thousands of fingers brushing against each other does it take to make love? Why does anyone ever make love?
    My thoughts are going to my childhood, Oskar. To when I was a girl. I am sitting here thinking about fistfuls of pebbles, and the first time I noticed hairs under my arms.
    My thoughts are around my mother's neck. Her pearls.
    When I first liked the smell of perfume, and how Anna and I would lie in the darkness of our bedroom, in the warmth of our bed.
    I told her one night what I had seen behind the shed behind our house. She made me promise never to speak a word about it. I promised her.
    Can I watch you kiss?
    Can you watch us kiss?
    You could tell me where you are going to kiss, and I could hide and watch.
    She laughed, which was how she said yes.
    We woke up in the middle of the night. I do not know who woke up first. Or if we woke up at the same time.
    What does it feel like? I asked her.
    What does what feel like?
    To kiss.
    She laughed.
    It feels wet, she said.
    I laughed.
    It feels wet and warm and very strange at first.
    I laughed.
    Like this, she said, and she grabbed the sides of my face and pulled me into her.
    I had never felt so in love in my life, and I have not felt so in love since.
    We were innocent.
    How could anything be more innocent than the two of us kissing in that bed?
    How could anything less deserve to be destroyed?
    I told him, I will try harder if you will stay.
    OK, he wrote.
    Just please do not leave me.
    OK.
    We never have to mention this.
    OK.
    I am thinking about shoes, for some reason. How many pairs I have worn in my life. And how many times my feet have slipped into and out of them. And how I put them at the foot of the bed, pointing away from the bed.
    My thoughts are going down a chimney and burning.
    Footsteps above. Frying onions. Clinking crystal.
    We were not rich, but there was nothing we wanted. From my bedroom window I watched the world. And I was safe from the world. I watched my father fall apart. The nearer the war came, the farther he went. Was that the only way he knew to protect